Learning How to Live In-between
This season of living in-between has made the past few weeks seem uneventful–online.
During my two week vacation to Australia and New Zealand I was hiking, snorkeling, paddle-boarding, boating, sailing, reading, and moving through the days without much thought for anything else.
Apart from that, I’ve been at the desk, working through the next stretch of Elspeth’s story, and returning to the ordinary things in between.
There’s a restlessness that comes with waiting in the stillness — and if you listen hard enough, you can hear the answers in the unspoken.
On Progress, Patience, and the Long View
Years ago, this kind of season made me uneasy. I wanted visible progress. Proof that something was happening. I believed that progress had to announce itself in order to count.
I let go of that way of thinking when I was training for competitions. Showing up in my everyday life, day after day after day after day.
Eating the same foods.
Doing the same workouts.
Trusting that when I reached the end, the finished result would appear only because I had stayed with it.
Parenting taught me the same thing, only with more moving parts.
You do the work,
Try to stay present,
And then you adjust–
Accepting that you don’t get to control most of it — especially when you’re raising another human being with their own thoughts and feelings.
Returning to the Page–Living the In-between
That’s where I am now.
I come back to the pages and I think about what comes next for Elspeth.
Some days I settle into it easily.
Others I resist it.
Both are valid.
I don’t try to explain away this part of the process anymore.
It is what it is.
The work moves when it’s ready to move.
I show up and meet it where it is.
That’s the season I’m in–living in the in-between.
When Nothing is Resolved
I’m practicing something I’ve had to practice before: staying present without bracing. Letting the days pass without demanding they justify themselves. Accepting that this, too, is part of the work — even if it looks nothing like the part that can be measured.
I’m working hard not to dress that up anymore.
Because I see how many of us have forgotten how to sit inside a moment that doesn’t offer immediate resolution. We reach for noise. For motion. For anything that keeps us from feeling the unease of an unanswered season: Scrolling. Numbing. Planning. Explaining. Fixing.
And sometimes the deeper work is none of that.
Oftentimes the work is learning how to stay.
If you’re here too — in a season that’s asking more patience of you than you expected — you’re not alone.
Some paths don’t ask for action right away.
Instead, they ask for vulnerability–relinquishing the need to control every outcome.
Then they ask you to stop managing the moment and begin inhabiting it.
And if that’s where you are, I hope you give yourself permission to stay there long enough for something real to take root.
