What Roadside Flowers Teach Us About Waiting

I was driving to town the other day thinking about my grocery list, when the coreopsis along the roadside caught my eye. A whole stretch of them, beautiful gold and red colors. Looking closer, I noticed that some of the blooms were at their peak, wide open and vivid, while others, just a few feet away, had already gone brown and papery at the edges. Same species, same soil, same stretch of road. And yet each plant was living in a completely different moment of its own.

We tend to imagine time as something everyone experiences together, on the same schedule. But out there on the roadside, it was obvious that wasn’t true. Some coreopsis were still waiting to arrive at their fullness. Others had already arrived, done their work, and moved on toward seed. Nothing was behind. Nothing was ahead. They were each just where they were.

That got me thinking about waiting, the particular pain that accompanies it at times, and how differently I’ve experienced it depending on where my head was at the time.

I know the restless kind of waiting well. There was a time a few years back when I was waiting on some test results, and I remember checking my phone obsessively, as if refreshing my email might somehow make the lab move faster. I’ve felt that same twitchy impatience watching seedlings I babied for weeks, willing them to break through the soil a day sooner than they were going to. That version of waiting is exhausting. It’s full of checking, refreshing, pacing. A low hum of anxiety that convinces you that if you just watch closely enough, or worry hard enough, you can nudge time along.

Somewhere along the way, though, I have noticed a shift. I don’t remember the exact moment it happened, so much as I remember noticing, one day, that I wasn’t doing that anymore. I was relaxing into the waiting. It came when I realized a fact I’d resisted for years: results do not happen any faster because I am anxious about them. Nothing about my anxiety or impatience changes the pace of anything. The test results arrived on their own timeline regardless of how many times I checked my phone. Once that truth landed not just as an idea, but as something I believed in my body, waiting started to feel less like a cage and more like flowing water. Something to be in, not something to fight.

That’s not the same as giving up or checking out. I still tend the garden. I still show up for the follow-up appointment. The difference is I’ve stopped watching the clock as much.

Which brings me back to the roadside. If the coreopsis can hold both the ones blooming with color and the ones already fading, all in the same roadside, maybe that’s the more honest picture of how time actually moves through life. Not a single shared countdown, but a whole field of things arriving, peaking, and finishing, each in its own time.

That idea that time isn’t a shared countdown but a field of things each moving at their own pace,  pushes against something deep in how we’re taught to live. There’s an old idea, showing up in different forms across Taoist thought and elsewhere, of not forcing outcomes before they’re ready: letting a thing unfold at the pace it unfolds, rather than muscling it into place early. You see this in nature constantly. You can’t talk a seed into sprouting sooner. You can’t argue a hawk into migrating on your schedule. The natural world simply doesn’t recognize urgency as a virtue. And yet we build entire systems – productivity apps, five-year plans, wellness routines promising results in “30 days or less” – designed to convince us that if we just try hard enough, we can outpace time itself.

I don’t think waiting well means doing nothing. The coreopsis aren’t idle while they wait to bloom. They’re pulling water, building cells, doing the invisible work that has to happen before anything visible can show up. Waiting, done right, looks less like passivity and more like preparation you can’t see from the outside. The shift isn’t from doing to not-doing. It’s from anxious doing to trusting doing, still showing up, still tending the garden, just without the constant, exhausting check-in on whether it’s happening fast enough.

If you’re in a season of waiting right now (for a diagnosis, a decision, a garden, or a next chapter) here’s a small practice I’ve found useful. Once a day, name one thing that is quietly happening even though you can’t see it yet. Not a hope, not a wish, an actual, physical process already underway. Roots thickening. A wound closing. A decision slowly clarifying in the back of your mind. Naming it doesn’t speed it up. But it reminds you that “nothing is happening” is almost never true. Something always is.

I naturally observe that roadside most days now. The same stretch that holds plants in their own times – blooms at their peak and blooms already gone to brown and seed, side by side, none of them behind, none of them ahead. I used to think of the brown ones as an ending. Now I see them as one kind of waiting finished, making room for the next kind to begin. Further down the road, the ones still wide open haven’t caught up yet, and aren’t in any hurry to. They’re just where they need to be.  And I’m starting to believe that’s the same place I am.

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