The ordinary world offers more once it stops being treated as waiting time.

Whole stretches of a life get quietly filed as the gap before the real thing starts. This job until the better one, this year until the move, this stage until the children are older. Filed that way, they cannot give anything back, because nothing in them is being received. The years pass at the same rate either way; only the receiving has been switched off.

Name what you are currently treating as an anteroom and ask what it would mean to let it count. You are not being asked to pretend it is your ideal life, only to be present in the part that is actually happening.