The Wait

This poem explores one of the most difficult forms of waiting: not waiting for something abstract or uncertain, but waiting for something that is already known to be real through observation, yet has never been directly entered or experienced.

It reflects on the tension between intuition and time, and the emotional exhaustion that can arise when conviction about the experience arriving persists long after certainty of its non-arrival would have been easier.

Often the hardest question is not what we are waiting for.

It is how we continue to live while we wait.

This poem comes from living with a kind of certainty I struggle to explain.

There are things I have felt deeply would one day become part of my life—certain relationships, meaningful work, a sense of home. They didn't feel like wishes so much as quiet convictions. Yet no matter how strongly I felt them, I couldn't know when, or even if, they would arrive.

That uncertainty became exhausting.

One of the tensions running through this poem is the relationship between intuition and expectation. There is a fine line between trusting something that genuinely calls to us and becoming attached to a future that reality has not promised. Learning where that line is has been one of the more challenging parts of my own journey.

The final question still resonates with me:

“When will I learn
When to know and
When not to?”

I don't think it's asking me to stop listening to intuition.

It's asking for the wisdom to recognize when intuition is inviting me to participate fully in the present while continuing to believe in a desirable future, and when it has quietly become another way of waiting for that future before allowimg my life to begin.

I don't know that I've fully answered that question.

But I think it was the right one to ask.