Learning to Wait: What Life in France Slowly Teaches You About Patience

I didn’t set out to write an article about waiting. The idea came to me recently after I was invited to speak to a group of people preparing to move abroad. I was asked to reflect on what felt hardest in the beginning and what still shows up now, after many years of living in France. As I was answering questions and thinking back over my early days here, a theme kept resurfacing. It wasn’t the paperwork or the language barrier, or even the culture shock. It was waiting.

Waiting seems to be woven into life in France in small but persistent ways. In fact, it begins before you even leave your home country. You wait for visa paperwork to be approved and official letters that may or may not arrive when you expect them to. You wait for confirmation emails, appointments, stamps, and signatures. You tell yourself this is just the pre-move phase, that once you arrive, things will feel more settled.

Then you arrive, and the waiting continues.

You wait at the airport carousel for luggage that takes its time to finally appear. You wait to see if the boxes from your previous life will arrive in three weeks’ or three months’ time. You wait to hear back from landlords, banks, schools, phone companies, and internet providers. You wait for your appointment time, even when you arrived early and followed all the rules. You wait, because that is simply how things unfold here.

In France, waiting doesn’t always come with apologies or explanations. A delivery window might be listed as “between 9:00 and 12:00,” which could mean 9:15, or 11:58, or not at all that day. A package may show as “out for delivery” and remain in that mysterious state for hours. A technician might arrive two hours later than planned, and no one acts particularly surprised by this. It’s not a failure of the system. It is the system.

In the beginning, this can feel deeply unsettling, especially if you come from a culture where efficiency, predictability, and speed are treated almost like personal virtues. Early on, I remember taking delays personally. I would feel irritated, then anxious, then frustrated with myself for feeling irritated. Why wasn’t I handling this better? Why did a late delivery have the power to derail my entire afternoon?

What I didn’t understand yet was that waiting in France is not a temporary inconvenience you eventually outgrow. It’s a rhythm you learn to move with, and that adjustment takes time.

Waiting shows up in daily life in small, almost comical ways. You wait in line at the bakery while the person ahead of you chats leisurely with the cashier. You wait while paperwork is reviewed in silence. You wait while someone finishes a conversation before turning their attention back to you. You wait because things happen one at a time here, not all at once…and life doesn’t rush to accommodate your schedule.

At first this can feel like resistance, almost like the country itself is pushing back. Over time, it begins to feel more like an invitation to slow down (even if you didn’t ask for one).

What makes waiting especially challenging in the early years abroad is not just the delay itself. It’s the uncertainty layered on top of it. When you’re new, you don’t yet know what’s normal and what’s a problem. Is this delay expected, or should I be worried? Is it appropriate to follow up, or would that make things worse? You spend a lot of energy trying to read situations correctly, and often the waiting becomes emotionally charged.

There’s also the deeper kind of waiting that doesn’t get talked about as often: the waiting to feel settled, and to feel capable again. The waiting to recognize yourself in your own life. You’re waiting for confidence to return, for routines to form, for relationships to deepen, and for life overall to feel less challenging.

I didn’t realize how much patience this kind of waiting requires. It’s not passive; it asks something of you. It asks you to sit with discomfort, to resist the urge to push or force, to trust that things are unfolding even when you can’t see how.

Over the years, my relationship with waiting has changed, not because France suddenly became faster, but because I stopped expecting it to operate like somewhere else. I stopped measuring my days by how efficiently I could move through them, and began to leave more space in my schedule — not because I had mastered patience, but because experience taught me that things rarely go exactly as planned.

That shift didn’t happen all at once; it happened little by little, in small moments. Like the day I stopped rearranging my afternoon around a delivery that might or might not arrive. Or the moment I realized that being five minutes late did not carry the same weight here. The realization that waiting did not mean nothing was happening; it simply meant it was happening on a different timeline.

There is a subtle lesson embedded in all of this. Living abroad asks you to loosen your grip on control. Waiting exposes the places where you’re still trying to manage outcomes, still trying to make things move faster through sheer effort. Over time, you learn which things are worth pushing and which things require patience instead.

This doesn’t mean you stop advocating for yourself or become endlessly accommodating; it means you learn discernment. You learn when waiting is part of the process and when it’s a signal to speak up. That distinction takes time to develop, and you only learn it by living it.

Waiting also changes how you experience time itself. In a culture that doesn’t rush through every interaction, moments stretch. Conversations last longer. Meals take their time. Even inconveniences invite you to notice your surroundings. You become aware of how often impatience comes from wanting to be somewhere else, instead of where you are.

I used to think that adapting to life abroad meant becoming more efficient, more capable, more fluent. Now I think it has more to do with becoming more spacious: learning to pause without panicking, and learning to let things unfold without assuming something has gone wrong.

For those preparing to move abroad, this can be one of the hardest adjustments to anticipate. You can prepare for paperwork and logistics. You can research neighborhoods and schools. It’s harder to prepare for the emotional work of waiting without clear timelines or guarantees.

And for those already living here, waiting doesn’t disappear after the first year; it simply changes shape. You wait for clarity around next steps. You wait for opportunities. You wait for certain things to feel easier than they did before. Some forms of waiting are practical; others are deeply personal.

What changes over time is your relationship to it. You begin to trust that not everything needs immediate resolution. You begin to recognize that pauses are not always setbacks. Sometimes they’re there to give you space, sometimes they’re there for protection, and sometimes they’re there just because that’s how life works here.

If you’re in the thick of this adjustment now, it may feel tiring. It may feel like everything requires more patience than you expected. If so, don’t take it as a sign that you’re doing something wrong. It means you’re learning how to live within a different rhythm, one that asks for presence more than speed.

There’s something about this process that strengthens you. You become less reactive and learn to sit with uncertainty without rushing to fill it. You discover that your sense of stability doesn’t have to depend on things moving quickly.

Over time, waiting stops feeling like an obstacle and starts feeling like a teacher. It shows you where you’re still gripping onto things too tightly. It reminds you that adaptation is not about fixing everything, but about learning how to stay steady while things unfold.

Life abroad doesn’t stop asking you to wait. But it does offer you the chance to meet that waiting with more ease than you once thought possible.

And one day, you might find yourself sitting in a café, waiting for something that used to make you anxious, and noticing that you feel calm…not because life has become predictable, but because you’ve learned how to live inside the pause.

That, too, is part of building a life here.

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If life abroad has been asking more patience of you than you expected, you’re not alone. I share daily reflections, insights, and lived expat experience on Facebook & Instagram for anyone navigating this adjustment in real time. Feel free to follow along :)

I’m also preparing a 21-part video series about life abroad, designed to support those in the early phases of settling in and adjusting. If that sounds like something you’d want to explore, staying connected is the best way to hear about it first.