Waiting Well: Patience as a Creative Force

Spaces between
Written by Vincent Ganne
Spaces between2-minute read

Waiting Well: Patience as a Creative Force

Why a painting dries on its own clock.

Patient poverty: what medieval monks called staying present when you might receive nothing at all.

My studio taught me patience the hard way. A painting won’t resolve, and I want to force it finished. But oil and cold wax keep their own time. Each layer has to rest before the next one goes on. It dries when it dries. When I finally stop pushing and simply wait, I begin to see what the painting wants to be.

Writing Scent of a Truffle took years of not knowing what I was doing. The early drafts felt lifeless because I kept imposing my ideas instead of listening. My characters needed time to breathe in my head. Scenes had to compost into something richer. The book, and Adèle with it, found its voice only after I learned to wait.

Patience isn’t sitting still and suffering through. Buddhists count it among the six perfections, and they don’t mean gritting your teeth. They mean the gardener who knows you can’t pull on a seedling to make it grow faster. Medieval monks had a name for staying present when you might receive nothing at all: patient poverty.

Our impatience isn’t a character flaw. We live inside systems built for instant answers, and we’ve lost some of our ability to hold a tension without rushing to fix it. Yet creative work needs what speed can’t give: fallow time, the way a field does. Ideas germinate in the dark. Paint dries between sessions. A novel needs long stretches when you don’t write at all, while something beneath the surface goes quietly on working.

Some things can’t be seized, only received.

Rilke told a young poet to live the questions rather than race toward the answers. That is what I mean by waiting well. Not enduring something until it’s over, but making space for what needs to arrive. Staying with uncertainty, curious rather than anxious, and trusting that the work has its own intelligence, on a clock I can’t see.

When I force things, in painting, in writing, anywhere else, the work comes out thin and strained. When I really wait, paying attention rather than just enduring, something else shows up. The painting figures itself out. The sentence I’ve been chasing arrives when I’m not looking. A character’s motivation becomes suddenly obvious.

Every winter, the truffle hunter walks the same rows of oaks. Underground, in the dark, the truffle forms its slow partnership with the roots. Some years it appears. Some years it doesn’t. He goes out anyway, without guarantee. He isn’t passive. He has understood that some things can’t be seized, only received, and he makes sure he is there when they come.

Vincent Ganne
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The Richest Color: Gray, and the Empty Spaces of a Painting