There is a moment in The Return of the King that gets little attention. Faramir and Éowyn stand together in the Houses of Healing, both wounded, both watching the war continue without them. Faramir says: “You and I, we must endure with patience the hours of waiting.”

No battle cry. No plan. Just: we wait, and we do it well.

The Stoics spent an unusual amount of time thinking about inaction. Not as a failure state but as a real condition that required its own discipline. Epictetus, who had no freedom of movement as a slave, understood that the space between events is not empty — it is full of how you are.

Marcus Aurelius, on the other hand, had all the power in the Roman world and still wrote endlessly about waiting. About the gap between stimulus and response. About the long nights of campaign when nothing happened and everything still depended on your inner state.

Both of them arrived at the same place: the hours between actions are not time wasted. They are time that reveals character.

Software development is mostly waiting.

Waiting for CI. Waiting for review. Waiting for a decision to be made three levels above you. Waiting for a dependency to be fixed, a blocker to be cleared, a conversation to happen that you cannot force.

The temptation is to fill this time with noise. Reflexive meetings. Speculative work on things not yet decided. Anxious re-checks of things already sent.

The Stoic alternative is not to sit idle. It is to do the next available right thing with full attention, and let the waiting be waiting. Read the code you don’t understand yet. Write the test for the edge case nobody mentioned. Think clearly about the next problem.

Éowyn does not pace the halls inventing battles to fight. She stands at the wall and looks east, and she endures. The endurance is the practice.

What makes this hard is that waiting feels like falling behind.

It is not. Falling behind is rushing a decision that isn’t ready, shipping code that isn’t stable, opening a conversation before you’ve understood the situation. Speed in the wrong direction is not progress.

The hours of waiting are when you become the person who deserves the next moment. You can spend them badly — anxious, distracted, performing busyness — or you can spend them as a craftsman: alert, present, preparing without grasping.

Faramir does not resent the wait. He names it honestly and invites someone else to share it with him.

That is more Stoic than any quote about virtue.