Best way to pause an actor command and retry it without blocking the actor

hello, I am trying to find the best way to pause an actor command and retry it without blocking the actor itselt.
Basically events are filling a hashtable and I need to wait until a specific index of my table is received. So I need to try on a regular basis to see if the array is received but without blocking the actor as it needs to continue to receive other events.
Thanks

Scheduling an internal retry command to the actor itself would be one way to do that. You can find an example in the docs here: Interaction Patterns • Akka Documentation

If you want to defer messages in the meanwhile, that is also possible by stashing them. Stash • Akka Documentation