Hexagram 5, Waiting

Three solid lines of Heaven underneath, full of push, and Water sitting above them. All that force, and the counsel is to wait.

The figure

Heaven sits below, the father, creative and strong. Water sits above, the middle son, the abyss, depth and danger. The picture is clouds building in the sky. The rain is coming. You can smell it. It is simply not here yet, and nothing you do will hurry it.

Heaven below is the strength you have ready. Water above is the river you have to cross, and it is in flood right now. The figure says you are strong enough to cross, and the figure also says not today. Those two things are both true at once, and holding both is the whole lesson of this hexagram.

Its pair is Hexagram 6, Conflict, the same figure turned upside down, which is what happens when the waiting runs out.

When it comes up in a reading

When Waiting comes up for a question, the moment is telling you the thing you want is on its way and that the timing is not yours to set. Your part is to be ready when it arrives.

The sense of the hexagram is that this is active waiting. There is a difference between the farmer who has ploughed and sown and is watching the sky, and the one who has done nothing and is also watching the sky. Both look the same from the road. Only one of them gets a crop. If you have cast this, ask yourself which farmer you are, and if the answer is the second one, there is work to do before you have earned the right to wait.

The hexagram also carries a plain piece of counsel about how to live while you wait. Eat, drink, enjoy your meal and your company. The old picture is of someone who knows the flood will go down and sees no reason to stand on the bank all day being miserable about it. Worry is not a form of preparation, although it does a very good impression of one.

And a caution. Waiting that goes on past the point where you could have moved has stopped being patience. Keep checking. When the water drops, cross.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you understand timing better than most people ever will. You can sense when a situation is ripe and when it is still green, and you have the discipline to act on what you sense. That second part is the rare bit.

Your patience is the real kind. Most people's patience is restlessness with the lid on. Yours comes from trust in the process, from knowing that some things cannot be hurried and not minding that they cannot. While you wait you are watching, learning and getting into position. The waiting is never empty.

Over the long run you tend to outperform people far busier than you, because you walk in when a thing is ready and walk out when it is spent, where they come and go on a whim. You have a calming effect on anxious people and frantic situations. Your lack of hurry tells the room, without a word, that things are fine.

The shadow is waiting that has quietly turned into avoidance. The readiness to wait can become the habit of never moving, especially when the move would have been uncomfortable. Telling the difference between patience and fear is the ongoing discipline of this hexagram, and I will say from experience that fear is very good at dressing up as wisdom. The second shadow is misreading the moment. Your sense of timing is good. It is not perfect. Checking it against what is actually happening keeps it good.

At maturity you act with extraordinary effect when you act, precisely because you waited for the right moment. A life that shows a pattern of patient preparation followed by one decisive move, over and over, with results out of all proportion to the visible effort. That is what this hexagram is for.

If a line moves

Lines are counted from the bottom. A moving lower line puts the matter at its beginning, the danger still far off and the counsel to carry on as normal and keep your strength. A moving middle line puts you close to the water, where the temptation to rush is strongest and the counsel is to hold your nerve and your tongue. A moving upper line is the end of the matter, where you have fallen into the water after all and the going too far is panic, when what the moment asks is to accept the help that turns up, even from an unexpected quarter. Change the moving line to its opposite and you have the second hexagram, the direction things are heading. The How to Cast a Hexagram page shows how.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page gives Heaven and Water on their own, with their lines, their places in the family and the pictures they carry. The Chinese Astrology section has a page on Yin and Yang for the two kinds of line. My own association in the tarot is the Seven of Pentacles, the gardener leaning on the hoe looking at a crop that is not ready yet, and I hold that as my picture and nothing stronger.

What are you waiting for right now, and have you done the ploughing?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.