Learning to hold space for dissent is a core skill for leadership. Recently, on my co-op’s board (dwelling), a straw vote revealed just how divisive things could be. The sides felt strongly, each convinced of their position. Now, we’re at an impasse. Neither side wants to offend the other nor be offended themselves. It’s a delicate stalemate, held together by silence.

Lao Tzu once asked:

Do you have the patience to wait
Till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
Till the right action arises by itself?

That line has been echoing for me, especially as my personal life has shifted. Recently I received word that my divorce was final. It marked the end of a nine-year cycle, not just the legal process, but the time it takes for long, honest conversations that must happen for two people to arrive at the end of a relationship, amicably.

In the years leading up, I was immersed in doing grieving, feeling uncertain, wrestling with confusion and fear, but also holding onto hope, excitement, joy, worry, and eventually relief. When the finality came, what I wanted most was quiet. Not the kind of quiet you get from lying in bed, but a deeper stillness: to stop moving, stop producing, stop planning. To just be.

And yet, that’s hard. After years of hoping, dreaming, planning, all a kind of doing, I was suddenly without a blueprint. Free but unmoored. What comes next? I don’t know.

Maybe that’s why the board conflict felt familiar. Whether in governance or in love, we humans are so skilled at laboring, striving, solving, products of religion, capitalism, or both. But do we know how to be still? To resist rushing toward action, and instead allow the “right action” to rise naturally?

That’s what I’d like to learn: to hold space for dissent, for uncertainty, for the unformed. To trust that stillness is not stagnation but a kind of leadership, too.