The Sacred Work of 'Doing Nothing'
Not long after I came home from the hospital, there was a morning that I was lying in bed watching something on TV. Justin was in the loft just outside the bedroom, playing Minecraft on the desktop computer that is out there. I heard him get audibly frustrated with something that wasn’t going right. I started to get out of bed, almost on instinct, to go and help fix what was wrong.
Barb was calm, but firm. “What exactly,” she asked, “do you think you are doing? Get back in bed and rest.”
While my self-care instincts have never been good, I like to think that my heart was in the right place. I just wanted to help. If you are anything like me, your default setting when someone you care about is hurting, angry, or overwhelmed is to try to fix it.
I am a fixer by nature and training. My brain immediately goes into tactical mode when people are in trouble. What is the plan? What are the actionable steps? How do we mitigate the damage, minimize the pain, and pull this situation back into some semblance of order? It comes from a good place—a deep desire to protect the people I love from suffering—but if I am being completely honest with myself, it also comes from a place of self-preservation. Watching someone you love navigate a massive, untamed emotion is uncomfortable. It makes us feel helpless. And so, we reach for tools to make the bad feelings go away as quickly as possible.
We offer silver linings. We give unsolicited advice. We say things like, “Well, at least...” or “Have you tried...” or “Look on the bright side.” We attempt to tidy up their emotional living room while they are still in the middle of the storm.
We do this because our culture conditions us to believe that action is the only true virtue. If you aren’t solving the problem, you aren’t helping. If you are just sitting there, you are wasting time. We treat emotional discomfort like a leaky faucet or a broken appliance—something to be repaired instantly so everyone can get back to normal.
Not actively helping means you are ‘doing nothing.’
But over the last few years, through military service, raising kids, dealing with my own physical and mental health struggles, and navigating the messy reality of human relationships, I’ve come to realize something critical: most of the big stuff in life cannot be fixed. It can only be felt.
And when someone is in the thick of feeling something massive—grief, panic, deep disappointment, or explosive rage—the best thing we can do for them isn’t fixing it. It’s holding space.
Holding space is one of those phrases that sounds a little woo-woo on the surface, but in practice, it is rugged, gritty work.
Holding space means intentionally choosing to sit next to someone in their discomfort without trying to change how they feel. It means dropping your agenda, putting away your toolkit, and refusing the urge to tidy up their pain. It means saying, through your presence and your quiet focus: I see you. I see how hard this is. I am not afraid of how big this feeling is, and I am not going anywhere.
It sounds simple. It is hard as shit.
When my kids are overwhelmed and losing their minds over something that seems small to me, my immediate impulse is to explain to them why it’s not a big deal. When a friend is going through a devastating heartbreak or a career crisis, my brain wants to chart a six-step recovery roadmap. Doing nothing feels like failure. It feels like standing by while someone drowns.
But here’s the paradox: when we rush in to fix someone’s pain, we often inadvertently send them a few very harmful messages:
Your feelings are too much for me to handle.
You aren’t capable of sitting with this yourself.
My comfort with your emotion is more important than your need to feel it.
When we try to rush people through their grief, anxiety, or anger, we aren’t actually helping them heal. We are asking them to suppress their emotions so that we can feel less uncomfortable.
To hold space for someone is to offer them a rare and sacred gift: permission to be human.
In a world that demands constant productivity and immediate resolution, sitting quietly with someone’s unresolved agony looks like doing nothing. From the outside, it looks passive.
In reality, holding space requires an immense amount of strength, emotional stamina, and discipline. It requires you to build a bigger container within yourself—one that can hold your own anxiety about their pain while making room for them to be completely unraveled.
Think about the times in your own life when you were in the darkest valley. When the news was terrible, when the marriage was falling apart, when the grief was so heavy you could physically feel it in your chest. Did you want someone to pop in with a quick cliché or a five-point plan? Or did you just want someone who wasn’t afraid to sit in the dark with you for an hour?
The people (family, friends from church, the guys from SaW) who saved me in my hardest moments weren’t the ones who had all the answers. They were the ones who sat with me, listened to me vent, or sat with me in total silence without trying to fix it. They didn’t try to pull me out of the hole; they jumped down into the hole with me and said, “Yeah. It’s dark down here. But I’m not going anywhere.”
Holding space isn’t passive. It is a deliberate, kinetic act of solidarity. It is the embodiment of courage.
We live in a world that is chaotic, loud, and increasingly fragile. People are carrying heavy burdens—health issues, financial strain, family crises, and existential fear about the future. And just a cursory glance at the news will remind you that people are right to worry, right to be scared, and right to wonder what awaits in the dark corners of the future.
We can’t fix almost all of it. We can’t take away the world’s pain, and we often can’t even lessen the pain of the person sitting across the dinner table from us.
The truth is we don’t have to fix it to make a difference.
In our house we have a saying. When one of the kids comes to us with a problem, we ask them if they want to be HUGGED, HEARD, or HELPED. Sometimes we just want to know that someone is physically there with us. Sometimes, we just need to vent and share our feelings with a non-judgmental ear. And sometimes (and in doing this I have found that it is very much the minority) we want / need actual help solving the problem.
The next time someone you love comes to you with a big, messy, uncomfortable emotion, I encourage you to pause before you offer a solution. Resist the urge to fix, advise, or lessen the blow. Ask if they want to be hugged, heard, or helped.
Take a breath. Put away the toolkit. Just be there. Let them make their own sandwich, let them cry, let them be furious. Let the storm roll through, and serve as the anchor that holds steady while it does.
It might feel like you aren’t doing anything. But in a world that constantly tells us to hide our pain, giving someone a safe place to feel everything might just be the most important thing you ever do.
Be well, y’all. Take care of yourselves, and take care of each other.
And no matter what, keep pounding the rock.