🌿 A poem a day keeps the blues away…
THE WAITING—or when your next career chapter is not ready to introduce itself yet 🌿
🌻
I was waiting for something
to arrive. I didn’t know what.
Something buoyed, something
sun knocked. I placed my palms
up, little pads of butter, expecting.
All day, nothing. Longer than
that. My hair grew, fell out,
grew. Outside my window, I felt
the flick of a tail in September
wind. A bobcat sauntered across
the grass before me, the black tip
of its tail a pencil I’d like to sharpen.
I immediately hushed, crouched,
became a crumpled shock of
joy to see something this wild,
not myself. (…) Sometimes
what comes to us, we never called
for. (…)
It was as if a bank vault had
opened and I was just standing
there, stealing nothing.
🌻
— Jane Wong, The Waiting
Copyright © 2021 by Jane Wong. Originally published in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets.
🪴 If you’re thinking about a career change, you may recognise this particular kind of waiting.
You may be doing all the right things: reflecting, strategising, updating your CV, scanning job ads, having conversations, applying—and still your next step, that ever-elusive job, remains out of sight.
This “in-between” can be frustrating. It has the awkwardness of standing at a station, ready to leave things behind, but unsure which platform to get to—or whether a train will ever arrive to take you where you want to go.
But not all movement is visible.
Wong’s bobcat may have seemed to arrive from nowhere—it didn’t.
While she had been waiting for something to arrive—a waiting that felt like months and years judging by her hair—the bobcat had been on its journey, only to appear at the exact moment she least expected.
Image by Gabriele Brancati on pexels
We spend much of our lives chasing targets:
a target education, a target weight, a target job title, a target life.
But life has its own way of unfolding, too.
And sometimes, what it offers us is not exactly what we had planned—but something we had not yet imagined. Something that makes us feel as though we’re standing in front of an open bank vault, stealing nothing—because it has been given to us freely.
Our time has finally come.
📌 So, if this is you—waiting for something to arrive—remember:
You don’t have to force the whole next chapter into view today.
Something is always on the move, even when it feels as though you’re standing still.
🦋 Happy Sunday everyone! 🦋
With love,
Dina 🫶🏽
Resources:
-
Read Wong’s full poem here: https://poets.org/poem/waiting
- This week’s song : The Waiting by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers. Because, yes: sometimes “the waiting is the hardest part”. But “every day also brings another little yard”.
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