The Waiting is the Hardest Part
Tom Petty says it best when, at his Denver concert in 2006, he introduced a song that he called very close to his heart, but that “You’ve never heard it til you hear Eddie Vedder sing it.” He’s talking about ‘The Waiting’, and he’s right. I came across this version of ‘The Waiting’ while listening to a YouTube mix in which it happened to come up in the queue. Everything about it held me spellbound in a way a Tom Petty song never had before. I admired the humility with which Petty announced his friend, inviting another man to stage to sing a song Petty was known for by saying “maybe Eddie’ll come up.” In the video, Vedder stands up there next to Petty holding his hands as if grasping an invisible guitar in front of his mic. I noted that he looked a little unsure without the instrument, but then he grabs the mic and his soul streams out: “Oh, baby, don’t it feel like heaven right now? Don’t it feel like something from a dream?” I was locked in from that moment.
Eddie Vedder singing 'The Waiting' on stage with Tom Petty
There’s something in Vedder’s singing that I don’t hear in Petty’s version of the song. While Petty’s voice croons like he’s in that heaven-something of a dream, Vedder channels the pain, the anxiety of the waiting. It’s kind of magic to watch the two of them together on stage voicing those complementary experiences; and it works because the waiting and the reward have to be taken together with any good thing. I’ve been thinking about this song for a while now, and it recently clicked with me how it’s reflective of both this romantic relationship in Petty’s lyrics and the gifts of recovery we experience when we engage honestly in the work.
The song captures the experience of having made it through all the hardship to finally know something true and seemingly too good to be true for anyone who hasn’t experienced it. Vedder belts out that sentiment: “Yeah, I've never known nothing quite like this/ Don't it feel like tonight might never be again?/ Baby, we know better than to try and pretend/ Honey, no one could've ever told me 'bout this.” What he’s describing is the feeling of security, love and truth you finally have when you’re with someone right. Someone who truly sees you and loves you for all of that, who is open and honest about their own person for you to see and accept with that same love.
In recovery language, it voices that feeling when we’re finally living out the promises we’ve clung onto in the difficult times, doing the work and knowing it will get better despite not knowing when or how in every case. The promises state that “we will know a new freedom and a new happiness…we will know peace.” For me, I couldn’t even picture how those things would be fulfilled for me in early sobriety. And even now, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when and how I began to know these gifts as realities in my life. The thought that finally allowed me to understand how this song worked for a recovery translation came after a particularly difficult time for me. I knew what it was to have that happiness, freedom and peace, but I was feeling I’d lost them, at least for a time. I realize that happiness and all these wonderful feelings can’t be constant in how we experience them, and I know that there will always be hard times even in recovery. That’s life. When I began to think of the waiting and the reward as part of an ongoing experience rather than as phase one followed by phase two, it clicked. It’s that way in relationships as well. There will always be a waiting time when we’re living an experience of factors beyond our power to control.
The song has two versions of the refrain: “The waiting is the hardest part/ Every day you see one more card/ You take it on faith, you take it to the heart/ The waiting is the hardest part.” Petty also replaces that second lin with “Every day you get one more yard” in the second two refrains. The rest is all the same. I like the order in which he does this since the message is roughly the same, but it progresses slightly from the first to the final two. The first one, in the waiting, “you see one more card” as in a game that depends on the uncontrollable factor of the cards being played out. I’m not a card aficionado, but I know enough to say that the progress of the card game relies on how well those revealed complement the ones in your hand at a given point in the game. In the beginning of situations such as a new relationship or recovery, there’s a lot beyond our knowledge and our control. We know what kind of hand we have, though we may not totally realize its potential without knowledge of the cards we’re waiting on. But we receive a clearer idea of how things will progress as we receive more information. This information comes from experience, from communication and from introspection. Though we may be powerless over a number of factors in our recovery and unaware of what the future holds, we begin to develop a clearer idea of our potential and how we can live fulfilling lives when we engage in the work of recovery, cultivate connections with others and make time for conscious connection with our higher power. The line “every day you get one more yard” reflects the consistent progress we make when we do this; the diction choice bears the connotation of a football game type of progress, which can be slow and painful at times but can also be beautiful and unexpected. The promises are fulfilled in this way too: “sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly” - the guarantee is that they will always be fulfilled, no matter the speed at which we realize them in our lives.
The song acknowledge alternatives to waiting in these verses: “Well, yeah, I might have chased a couple women around/ All it ever got me was down/ Yeah, then there were those that made me feel good/ But never as good as I feel right now/ Baby, you're the only one that's ever known how/ To make me wanna live like I wanna live now.” For this speaker, past experiences with women were diversions from the path that involves waiting; chasing these relationships is not the same as patiently waiting for the development of a true one, and they all result in the same let down. Even those that “made me feel good”, cannot compare to the heaven that comes from the waiting. In recovery language, these verses reflect on active addiction. People talk about chasing a high or a feeling through drugs and alcohol, and it’s the same kind of pursuit as a person who chases relationships hoping to feel whole. Even in the substances we used or means we employed that did seem to work some magic, none of those results are as true or lasting as the result of the self work that comes from honestly engaging in recovery. The feeling we experience from that kind of patient work is the kind that makes us truly want to live without trying to escape life anymore.
The song changes pace for the next few lines, as Petty soothes, “Oh, don't let it kill you baby, don't let it get to you/ Don't let it kill you baby, don't let it get to you/ I'll be your bleeding heart, I'll be your crying fool/ Don't let this go too far, don't let it get to you.” These are the feelings we no longer can use temporary fixes to numb away. We can choose to let them get to us and revert to ultimately fatal means of coping, or we can continue doing the important, difficult work of living with the faith that we’re progressing ever forward in our conscious connection with God, ourselves and others. I love the line “I’ll be your bleeding heart, I’ll be your crying fool” - two images that on one level are undesirable things. A bleeding heart means damage and pain, and a crying fool sounds like a wimpy loser. But a bleeding heart, as opposed to a heart of stone or a pink emoji heart, is a real heart that performs as it should under conditions of real, traumatizing conditions. A bleeding heart is a working heart, even in the midst of the pain that might drive us to want to numb it all away or pretend everything is just peachy. And the crying fool has deeper meaning too. I took a Shakespeare course at Holy Cross with the brilliant Professor Helen Whall, whom I remember for two things: the towers of books and papers stacked haphazardly as if to entomb her in the office (it was really more of a ransacked-looking storage unit than an office); and her intense love of Shakespeare’s works. I’d always thought Shakespeare was cool enough before I took her class, and she solidified that interest into genuine appreciation and love of my own for his words. One thing I’ll always remember is her discussion of the Fool in his plays. She said that the Fool is the one character who appears silly, or foolish, but who when properly known is actually the truest voice of reason in the plays. To be a crying fool doesn’t mean that we’re volunteering to belittle ourselves into petty tears (see what I did there?); it means we’re offering to put aside our prideful egos and be our most true, feeling selves.
There’s a powerful sonnet by John Milton, the genius who authored the epic poem Paradise Lost, that comes to mind when I think of this waiting. Sonnet 19 is commonly referred to as ‘On His Blindness’; it’s a beautifully melancholic reflection on his lost sense of vision. This great man, as he faces a life in which his great talent faces a terrible handicap, ruminates on his circumstances: “When I consider how my light is spent,” he begins. He reflects on his great talent lodged useless in him. He asks what God will seek from him in his state of darkness, a visionless world of being; and amazingly, patience answers him, closing with the line: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” I’d long felt drawn to this poem, but I don’t think I really understood it until now. I think I felt too deeply the despair that Milton may have fought in the days before his vision was completely lost to him. It is widely believed that he wrote this sonnet as his vision had begun deteriorating. In going through the darkness, he has begun to imagine a new sort of light in himself, one that allows him to conceive of this sonnet that accepted the greatness in waiting. Big shout out to his daughters, who transcribed the entirety of Paradise Lost for him later in life when he was completely blind. The guy did OK for himself after all, blindness considered. Milton isn’t implying that you should stand around idly your whole life and can expect to reap rewards for doing so; rather, he’s saying that there are times when we’ll have to practice patience and acceptance of our limits and trials in the present moment in order to get to the place where we can contribute our verse and fulfill the life God has in store for us. We’re not expected to be operating at a hundred percent all the time, if ever. In the lower phases we can live in the waiting with faith in something greater. Petty touches on this in each refrain: “you take it on faith, you take it to the heart.”
‘The Waiting’ reflects that unbearable lightness in the nascent hopes we have in life - relationships, recovery, career paths, etc. - when you’re learning to navigate everything; you have this terrifying hope that something good is coming. and you want it now, but there must be waiting. The song is about acceptance of that waiting period and gratitude for the heaven that comes for those who wait. Living in recovery isn’t a straight trajectory up into that heaven state. There will always be waiting in the ebbs when grief, ennui, anxiety, and uncertainty enter our lives. The waiting is the hardest part, because we’ve gotten a taste of something from a dream, but now we know the role of patience and acceptance. Acceptance is the waiting, the patient endurance of the hard work that true recovery, that life requires.
