Day 19 : To Waver
The only way out is through.
Waver with the wind.
Anchored at the shore.
I’ve had one of those days where it feels like the universe is standing right at my shoulder, whispering directly into my ear.
The first whisper came this morning when my coach, Natalie, said, “The only way out is through.”
Later in the day, during a Reiki session, my healer shared two short sentences that had come through for me: “Waver with the wind. Anchored at the shore.”
Both phrases have been swirling within me ever since.
There’s something deeply resonant about the word waver, how it holds both the trembling of uncertainty and the natural movement of life itself. For the past several weeks, I’ve been grappling with a lot of uncomfortable fear, doubt, and an aching question of “what’s the point of any of this?” These feelings slowly but surely lead me toward the edge of apathy, toward the dark fear that everything might ultimately be pointless.
This evening, in the quiet after the kid’s bedtime, I looked into the word waver and found the following:
Expanding the word:
Waver (verb)
Definition:
To move back and forth; to flutter, flicker, or shake (as in a flame or a flag).
To be indecisive or unsteady; to vacillate or hesitate in making a decision or maintaining a belief.
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Etymology & Origin
Waver comes from Middle English waveren, meaning to fluctuate, be restless, which itself comes from the base wave, meaning ‘to move like a wave.’
Root: wave + the frequentative verb suffix -er, suggesting repeated or continuous motion.
My notes: So, waver literally meant to move like waves: shifting, undulating, never completely motionless.
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Middle English and Old Norse Roots
The Middle English waveren (to fluctuate, move to and fro) likely comes from a Scandinavian source: compare Old Norse vafra, meaning to hover, waver, move unsteadily.
Vafra in turn is related to vafa, meaning to move in a circle, to wrap, to fold — which is also the root of English waft and weave.
My notes: In this early sense, waver was about motion through air or water, a kind of wandering or flowing energy that is never static. Any moments of stillness take place in motion.
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Proto-Indo-European Ancestry
Tracing deeper, these Germanic roots likely descend from the Proto-Indo-European root *webh-, meaning: “to move to and fro, to weave, to twist, to move around.”
This same ancient root gives us:
weave — to interlace threads, to create pattern through motion
web — a woven structure
wobble — to move unsteadily back and forth
wave — a ridge of water in motion
My notes: Across all of these, there is an archetypal gesture: movement that creates form through rhythm.
Wow! I just love the layers upon layers of meaning behind words.
So, before waver ever meant “to be indecisive or unsteady; to vacillate or hesitate in making a decision or maintaining a belief,” it described the living quality of motion itself, something flickering between states, alive and transient.
At its origin, waver describes a repeated, oscillating motion: wind sweeping through a field of tall grass, sunlight shimmering on the surface of the ocean, a flame shapeshifting in the breeze. It evokes movement without a fixed center, an energy that flows freely between forms rather than clinging to one, a dance between stillness and movement, the energy of change embodied in form.
Maybe to waver is not a weakness, but a rhythm. A reminder of what it means to move with the natural ebb and flow of life, to allow ourselves to be changed by wind and light, by grief and joy, by all the many layers of the human experience.
To be anchored at the shore is not to stop moving, but to trust that even as we rise and fall, something vast and steady, beneath us or deep within us, holds us through the wavering.
The only way out is through. Through the storms, the waves, the wind. Through the trembling portal of not knowing.
Today, I was reminded that the point isn’t to fix, get over, or get rid of what’s uncomfortable, but to let it move through us. To allow everything to ebb and flow like waves, rather than harden and stagnate inside us.
A true felt sense of safety and grounding doesn’t come from clinging to an impossible static state of feeling “good” all the time. It’s found in learning to trust the wavering between experiences, knowing that it is at the shoreline, between expansive trust in life’s creative essence and the ache of its fragility, that we find our anchor point.
The invitation here is to learning to waver with the wind, while remaining anchored at the shore.
Source note: Etymological references drawn from the following sources. Interpretive imagery and reflections on the word’s poetic essence are my own.
Wiktionary entry for “waver”
Etymonline entry for “waver”
Merriam-Webster definition and meaning of “waver”
Middle English Compendium (University of Michigan) entry for waveren
Wiktionary entry for Proto-Indo-European root *weyp-
YourDictionary origin of “waver”
