The In-Between Moments

I wish I could have things magically happening whenever I want.

So much of my life has been marked by waiting. Waiting for that check in the mail, waiting for that position to open up, waiting for interviews to come through, waiting for feedback, waiting, waiting.

At some point, I realized that life just happens. Yes, the waiting is part of it, a frustratingly necessary part.

And yes, I still feel that welled-up ball of uncertainty when a big thing is in the wings.

But at some point, I had to make a decision about whether life would be the moments when the dam broke, when the anticipation reached its zenith, or whether I'd take a different approach.

I'm not perfect at this, still a work in progress, but most of the time I've shifted to living life in the in-betweens.

Because, after all, 99% of life is those moments. If I'm just looking for the big breaks, the times where things meet my highest expectations—well, then I'm missing out on a whole lot.

It's not that those moments aren't great. They are.

But planning around them puts autonomy out of my own hands and into the decision matrix of someone else.

So yes, there's still a million things I'm excited about, waiting for, hoping will happen.

But I'm not frozen in the waiting. I look forward to them happening, imagine that life would be nice if they did, keeping living life in the meantime. They are smaller passing thoughts and not daily expectations.

This is where one of my favorite topics comes into play. Creativity and curiosity. If, instead of hoping and waiting for the big possibility, we use our minds and hands to build, to learn, to grow, then we'll teach our brains that joy and freedom and autonomy and possibility aren't connected to external factors.

And when good comes from outside our reach, we appreciate it and are thankful, but we weren't expecting it to be the only thing to work out—and our joy wasn't tied to it.

This is really hard to do.

I've been out of work before, waiting for projects to come in, waiting for checks to reach the mailbox, needing to pay the bills. I've been there many, many times. I know how that feels, and when you're at a point of not paying the bills versus hoping for something exciting to happen—those are different, the first requires acute attention, and the second is something different entirely.

In fact, if we take the approach of appreciating the in-betweens, of just being someone who starts to live life, liking the quiet moments, appreciating the beautiful chaos of a life lived, then we're not so moved by the anticipation, possibility, and uncertainty of the big unknowns coming to pass (or not).

Take running a marathon.

I enjoyed doing it, a lot.

And I hope to do it again someday.

When I prepared, I didn't make my entire life around the big moment of anticipation six months in the future. Rather, I created a lifestyle of enjoying the training days, looking forward to getting out on the runs, listening to audiobooks and being thankful for the changing beauty of nature—so when that big moment came, crossing that finish line, I wasn't overwhelmed by the weight of expectations. And then I did it again the next year.

Don't get me wrong, it felt amazing to make it a full marathon distance, to know what I was capable of. But I'd put in the 500 miles of training—and enjoyed it along the way. I created a plan that worked for me, and looking back, I enjoyed the miles of road running more than the joy of completing the race.

I try to take that approach in as many areas of my life as I can handle.

Appreciate and find ways to joy in the moment, in the things that could be perceived as mundane, and discover how those in-betweens can light you up, bring their own delights, and shape us into the people we want to be—over time.

I'm not discounting the big moments.

As a husband and father of two, I am grateful every day for the pivotal, one-way directional choices that shaped who I am. Those moments, and a few others like them, define who I am in the big picture. But the billion little instances between equally comprise who I am.

It's important to give each its proper weight.