“Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer
For the one who creates, waiting may be the hardest space to occupy during the creative process. Stirred up with an idea for a creative endeavor, we’d like to snap our fingers, proclaim “Tada,” and instantly view the creation we imagined. Yet, that’s not the way things unfold, is it?
Nature offers innumerable examples of the importance of the wait. A familiar illustration of this happens with butterflies. Within a cocoon, butterflies need the act of struggling as it builds vital muscles. Interfering with this struggle curtails development of strong wings that enable its emergence from the cocoon. I’m no entomologist so I don’t fully know all that occurs in this act of exiting a cocoon to bring forth its beauty. Yet it intrigues me to consider the work of waiting as a necessary act in the creative life as well.
When it comes to skill-building in our craft of creativity, waiting doesn’t usually top the list of what we’d like to learn. Perhaps we need to rethink that premise.
I shiver as the temperatures outside drop into wintry digits and imagine the warmth of a steaming bowl of soup for supper. Chopping celery, slicing carrots, and turning plump tomatoes into diced pieces, I begin the wait for what is to come. Adding vegetables and water to the soup pot, I inhale the flavors of the vegetable broth simmering on the stove. Yet, if I’m impulsive and don’t allow enough time for the flavors to fuse, the broth tastes watery, weak, and bland. If I wait for the slow long process of broth created from scratch, then add other vegetables, grains, and proteins, a savory soup emerges that will grace the table tonight. Even better, if I wait another day, basic ingredients improve overnight. The science behind this isn’t my expertise anymore, though I was once a home economics major! Somehow time enhances the flavors, brings about a more robust taste. Think about your favorite soup or chili. How often have you noted it simply tastes better the next day, when the flavors have melded into a more delightful taste?
Countless hours go on behind the scenes in the creative life. The process of creation requires waiting as a way of simmering, melding ideas into innovative offerings. Many small steps take place along the way, each worthy of the struggle. Staying the course invites us to wait, work, wait, work, rest, and do it all again. Quick flashes of inspiration aren’t enough.
When I sit down to write a letter to a friend, a poem for my own keeping, a chapter in a new book, or a blog for my readers, I can dash something off in no time flat. Yet the words taste flat when I roll them around on my tongue. My creative endeavors, whether soup, chili, or words, need time to commingle. Yet the hardest thing for me as a writer is to let my words simmer for a bit. I want once and done. Impatience wants the first draft to be the final draft.
Allowing words to sit for a bit provides perspective to occur. I write. Then I walk away for a day. Before dawn breaks, I return to the words I tossed onto pages the day before. With a fresh set of eyes, I see how the concepts sit on the page, what the constructions of words and thoughts have brought forth in the handiwork of my writing life. I revise after a bit of waiting; it helps create not only my words but me as a writer. In crafting my writing, I add new words, delete repeated weak ones, and give the concepts more dimensionality. The words taste better the next day as they sit a bit and revise a bit and then sit some more, like soup savored a day later.
We are ALL Creatives
Visual artists know the wonder that happens in the long slow of creating. First you prepare the blank canvas with gesso or a primer that smooths out the surface. Then you let the layer dry thoroughly. Next add a base layer, an underpainting of sorts, which helps create dimensionality to your canvas. Again, the paint needs drying time which varies depending on whether you are using acrylics or oils. Then you begin composing the creation you’ve been imaging, layering paint upon paint, allowing time for the colors to dry as you go forward.
Pottery requires the same invitations to waiting. Choose your clay then wedge it to eliminate air bubbles. Shape the clay on the potter’s wheel. Next comes trimming. Now it must dry. Then into the kiln to fire the clay and follow that by allowing the pottery to dry yet again. Then paint on a glaze and reheat the pottery. Waiting creates a sturdy vessel of beauty.
We are all creatives. We create in all sorts of ways: spreadsheets full of vital information, spreads of new dishes for the supper table, spread over pages a sequence of words for a future novel to be read by the fire on a cold night. We create little notes tucked into lunchboxes and thank you notes tucked in the mail. We create safe spaces when we listen long and well to a child, a friend, a client, or a patient. We create when we offer piano lessons, Pilate classes, or preparation ideas for planting a summer garden. We create, refine, start again, let things sit, polish things up, and finally have what we imagined from the start. Waiting wafts its way through every aspect of creativity, doesn’t it?
Reflection for Your Creative Innovations
Here, as the year draws to a close, consider what waiting has looked like over the last 12 months in your innovations.
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- What creative endeavors have woven their way through your year?
- What role has waiting played in those creations?
Let the questions that follow become writing and prayer prompts. Ponder with God what the year has held as you consider the work of waiting in your creative life.
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- Where and how have you built vital muscles as you have struggled in the wait? Where has impatience weakened your innovation as you plowed through too quickly?
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- What dream did you imagine would come to fruition by now, yet is still in progress? What emotions are you noticing in this state of waiting for what is not quite ready? Where do you feel it in your body? What mindset catches your attention?
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- How has waiting shaped your soul, mind, and body? Shaped your handiwork? What surprises you about the transformation that has occurred in you? In your project?
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- With a new year approaching, what are you waiting on? What keeps you steady in the waiting? What causes distress in the waiting? What has the waiting made possible? What has the waiting curtailed?
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- What’s been the most useful thing about waiting? What’s been the most surprising thing about waiting? What’s been the most frustrating thing about waiting?
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- What’s one thing you’ve appreciated about waiting? What’s one new way you’d like to harness waiting as a vital skill within your creative life?
May you savor the slow wait that brings forth great beauty as you ponder your life as a person full of creative wonder who walks through the world offering delight to others. Let’s keep relearning the fine art of waiting.
