What ahorita taught me about waiting
On institutional time, withheld permission, and the work that stays in your hands
When I moved to Querétaro, I learned ahorita before I understood most of the grammar around it. The word looks like a diminutive of ahora, now, so a newcomer assumes it means something close to right this second. In practice, it covers a generous range: in five minutes, later today, sometime this week, or a courteous version of probably never. People arriving from the United States tend to find this maddening for the first year or so. What I have come to appreciate is that the word is being honest about something most of our language hides: that timing usually belongs to circumstances rather than to the person speaking.
I have been thinking about ahorita this summer in a setting where the word is never spoken, which is the pace at which institutions move once they have asked you for something and received it. You build the thing carefully. You make the case in writing, with evidence, on the timeline the situation actually calls for. Then it enters a queue somewhere, and the calendar keeps turning. Nothing is refused. Nothing is approved either. Support agreed to in principle arrives in a form that would have been useful several months earlier, and meetings are scheduled, moved, and rescheduled.
This happens in universities and hospitals, in agencies and nonprofits, and in companies of every size, and it is part of the ordinary friction of doing meaningful work within a structure larger than yourself. It also produces a particular fatigue that most people misidentify. Delay is a fact of institutional life, and we tend to make our peace with it early. The fatigue comes from the mismatch between one person’s investment and the system’s metabolism, and from the message that mismatch appears to carry: that you cared more than the situation called for, that your sense of urgency was a misreading, that your judgment about what matters sits out of step with the people who hold the decisions.
I have learned to examine that message before granting it any authority. An institution can tell you what your work is worth only once you have handed it the instrument for making the assessment. Jung described projection as the psyche placing something of its own outside itself and then experiencing it as arriving from out there. We do this most reliably with the structures that hold formal power over our professional lives, because they present themselves as neutral arbiters and because they usually hold something we genuinely want.
I have written elsewhere about a long instance of this in my own life. I have practiced psychology under a supervised license in New Mexico since 1996, thirty years now, and have been denied independent licensure on the sole basis that my doctoral program carried a different accreditation than the board preferred. The education was excellent, and the choice was deliberate. The consequence has been three decades of institutional withholding, and for much of that time, I organized a portion of my professional energy around the recognition being withheld. That arrangement gave the board authority over my sense of legitimacy that ran well past its actual authority over my work.
What eventually changed was the interior. The board’s position remains what it has always been, and my relationship to it is what has moved. More than a thousand people served, a practice sustained across thirty years inside that constraint: this is evidence of something a licensing decision has no instrument to measure. Withdrawing the projection means understanding that a refusal describes the institution making it, while the description of the work itself belongs somewhere else entirely. That recognition arrived slowly, and it continues to require maintenance.
Waiting and patience look identical from the outside, and they differ in a way that matters. Waiting locates your next move inside someone else’s decision, so the months pass and you arrive at the far end holding whatever that decision turns out to be and very little else. Patience keeps your next move in your own hands while the decision takes whatever time it takes. Both consume the same calendar, and they produce different people at the end of it.
James Hollis writes that the second half of life turns on a change of question, from what the world asks of me to what wants to live through me, and a stall like this one is among the more common triggers for that change. In practice, the response looks ordinary. You keep making the case through the proper channels, in writing, with evidence, on a schedule you set rather than one you absorb. And you put real energy into the work whose return depends on no one’s signature: the students in front of you, the people you serve, the writing, the things you build and own outright. The first keeps your integrity with the institution intact, which matters because leaving a commitment badly costs more than it saves. The second keeps your own development free of a timeline you have no hand in.
Coming here taught me that an environment participates in a person’s development rather than merely surrounding it. Someone doing serious interior work while embedded in a structure that contradicts that work at every turn faces a disadvantage that effort alone will not overcome. Naming this is a form of maturity rather than a failure of loyalty, and it points toward a response that holds both things at once: keep the commitment, and widen the horizon. Stepping outside a comfortable arrangement is far easier to describe than to do, and it usually begins with something small and unglamorous rather than with a grand exit.
Ahorita makes no promises, and there is a strange freedom in that. The word declines to pretend that the speaker controls the timing, which leaves everyone free to get on with the parts they do control. I am finding it useful this month as a piece of practical psychology rather than as a phrase of Mexican Spanish.
So, a question, if you want one to carry into the week. Where are you waiting on a decision that has become a substitute for your own next move? And if the answer never arrives at all, what would you do between now and Friday?
— Mark
A Life Aligned is available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook from Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and other retailers. You can find all formats at drmarkarcuri.com/a-life-aligned.
Dr. Mark A. Arcuri is an integrative coach, author, speaker, and psychology professional based in Querétaro, México.
If this letter met something in your own situation, please pass it along to someone who might be standing in a similar place.