Waiting for the Tide

There’s a particular moment at Newhaven harbour that I keep returning to, both on my walks and at the easel. It isn’t the tide coming in and it isn’t the tide fully out. It’s the pause between - the boats resting at odd angles on wet mud, not quite afloat and not quite grounded, waiting for water that hasn’t arrived yet.

I noticed, painting this scene for the first time, that I wasn’t interested in the drama of full tide or the starkness of empty harbour. I kept being drawn back to this in-between moment instead. It took me a while to understand why.

Low tide asks something of you that a full harbour doesn’t. A boat afloat is doing what it’s built to do - you barely have to look at it. But a boat resting on wet mud, tilted, waiting, is a boat in a state most of us rarely pause to notice. It has stopped being useful for a while. It is simply there, patient, certain that the water will come back, in no hurry to make that happen any faster.

I think I paint this moment because I recognise it. Most of my life, and probably most of yours, isn’t spent in the dramatic parts - the launch, the race, the arrival. It’s spent in the waiting. The stretch between one useful thing and the next, when nothing much appears to be happening. We tend to rush through those stretches, or feel faintly guilty for being in them, as though only the moving parts of life count.

Newhaven harbour at low tide doesn’t feel that way. It feels unhurried in a way that seems almost deliberate. The boats aren’t apologising for resting. They know that the tide always comes back. There’s no anxiety in the waiting because the outcome was never actually in doubt.

I wonder what it would be like to sit in our own low-tide moments with that same certainty - not fighting the pause, not rushing to fill it, just trusting that the next thing will arrive when it’s ready to. I’m not sure I manage it often. But I notice I want to, every time I stand at that harbour wall.

Next time you find yourself in a stretch that feels like waiting - a quiet afternoon, a pause between plans, a moment where nothing much is happening - I’d invite you to notice whether it actually needs fixing or whether, like the boats, it might just be part of the rhythm. The tide always comes back. Perhaps that’s worth trusting a little more than we do.