Waiting through the wave

Emotional authority means something specific: before any decision, you wait. Not for a sign, not for certainty in the abstract sense, but for the wave to move through.

The wave is a physical thing. It starts somewhere in the solar plexus, builds, peaks, drops, and somewhere in the trough of it, there is clarity. The mind wants to call this clarity earlier, at the top of the excitement or the bottom of the dip. Both are wrong. Both feel conclusive. Neither is.

In practice, this means sleeping on things that feel obvious. It means sitting with yeses that arrive at 10 pm and checking them again at noon the next day. It means letting people wait a little longer for your answer, and finding, over time, that the people worth having in your life understand why.

What I noticed first, when I started living this, was how much energy I had been spending on decisions I had already made emotionally and was now defending intellectually. The waiting doesn't create the decision. It reveals which decisions were already made in the body, and which ones were made in fear.