Into the whiled

There’s a layer beneath decision-making that rarely gets named.

It is not simply uncertainty, and it is not the absence of clarity. It is the place where things are still forming, where consequence is already present even though resolution has not yet arrived. Where people are carrying weight without a shared language for what that weight is, or where it should rest.

This is the meanwhile.

Most work treats the meanwhile as something to move through quickly. A delay. A gap. A problem to be resolved so momentum can resume. The pressure for answers often arrives here, framed as responsibility. Something needs to be decided. Direction needs to be named. The room needs to exhale.

But beneath that pressure, something else is usually happening.

Understanding is still taking shape. Conditions are still shifting. The cost of moving too quickly has not yet been absorbed, but it will be. If not now, then later. If not visibly, then quietly. Often by the same people who have already been carrying more than their share.

I have spent much of my working life inside this layer. In organizing work where the stakes were real and uneven. In residential life where care was not an intervention but a way of living together. In therapeutic settings that took place in kitchens and living rooms, where questions lived in bodies and routines, not just in words. In systems work where decisions made far from a place landed directly on the people living there.

I did not move closer to this terrain. I stopped treating it as something I could stand outside of.

Recognizing that I was already living inside the meanwhile changed how I understood responsibility. It shifted how I listened, how I decided, and how quickly I trusted resolution. I became less interested in answers that allowed movement to resume, and more attentive to whether what followed could actually be carried.

Across these contexts, the same pattern repeated.

Clarity was often asked to carry more than it could responsibly hold. Resolution arrived before understanding had time to deepen. Simplification offered relief, but quietly reorganized what people would have to live with next.

What I learned is that the meanwhile is not empty time. It is a dense environment with its own demands. Staying here is not passive. It requires endurance and a willingness to remain accountable without forcing coherence too soon. Someone has to hold the tension that would otherwise be discharged through premature answers. Someone has to notice where pressure is landing, who is compensating, and what is being asked to hold things together when structures do not.

The work that happens in the meanwhile rarely looks impressive from the outside. It does not move quickly. It does not always produce clean narratives. But it shapes what becomes possible later. It determines whether what follows can actually be carried.

This page holds writing that comes from inside that layer.

Some of it stays close to lived experience. Some of it will trace patterns across systems, relationships, and institutions. Some of it will remain with questions longer than is comfortable.

The essays that live here are not arguments and not instructions. They are records of attention, shaped by the knowledge that language reorganizes rooms and that responsibility does not begin when clarity arrives. It begins earlier, in how we stay with what is still forming.

This is not a place for answers that settle things prematurely.

It is a place for work that respects the tempo of understanding, and for language that can hold complexity without asking it to become smaller in order to be bearable.

This is a look beneath the surface. Into the meanwhile.