The timing of your life

I woke up to snow in New York City. Though I am a summer girl, if winter comes every year, why not at least have one day of snow? It felt like for the longest time, it would never come. I would see the little snowflake icon on my weather, get excited, and the weather would shift by the time the day actually arrived. At this point, I’d given up. And yet, on the last day of February, I woke up to snow in New York City.

Timing’s a funny thing. Trust it.

The quote above is from my Notes app from March 31, 2022. My life looks almost nothing like it did a year ago. A year ago, I lived in Virginia, was finishing my last year of college, and was working on my thesis. I had built-in community everywhere, felt comfortable in Charlottesville, and was generally excited about what was to come. Funnily enough, a year later, I’m living in New York City without a really clear plan, but waiting for doors to open up.

(Random intervention: this wasn’t the blog post I had planned for today, but it’s the one that wanted to come out of me.)

Related Post: the age of milestones, or not.

How do you trust the timing of your life?

How do you trust the pieces to fall into place at the right time? Trusting Providence or fate?

In some reading related news, I’ve started War and Peace. At my age, it’s the hardest novel I’ve ever tried to read. It can be frustrating because the details of the Napoleonic Wars are so minute, but it’s also so endearing. Tolstoy has a way of making you fall in love with a character by bringing to light that one little thing about them again and again. In a lot of ways, it’s testing my patience. It’s a 1000+ page novel, and I only just passed 300. 

When we hear stories about our friends’ lives, how they got their jobs or how they met their spouse, we get the details. The “I talked to this person” or “I was at the party, and our eyes locked across the room.” I don’t always hear about the timing. Maybe I hear about the struggle, the frustrations at the many rejections piling up in their inboxes or the lack of responses on dating apps. 

What I’ve said before (and I’ll say again) is that I love this aspect of HIMYM. In the show, Ted talks about the tiny pieces of thread that led him to his wife, and how part of that was that he needed to become the type of person she would have wanted, and vice versa. As awful as it is to hear and feel, sometimes the timing’s not right. 

Related Post: 12 thoughts: from pain to abundance

The Stories We Read

Part of the wonder of living life is wandering into these moments where it feels like every tiny thing has aligned up to that point. That there were little moments of foreshadowing along the way highlighting the path that you’d take. For example, when I settled on hidden being my word for 2023, I saw it everywhere in 2022. An Instagram post that spoke to me. An old Note on my phone. The book I decided to read next.

War and Peace has these incredible moments that I call the theme of fate where the characters feel like they’re compelled to move forward despite what they want to do. When Andrei must go forward with a battle plan he actively disagreed with. When Pierre challenges someone to a duel. When Marya does not receive a letter from her brother (her father was weak with grief). When Nikolai feels like he must play cards (the pit in my stomach was the most pain I’ve felt this far from reading. This scene is based on Alexander Pushkin’s Queen of Spades. And now I really want to write a blog post on loving Russian literature!). 

I don’t think the idea of fate and timing is limited to characters in a story. It affects us too.

Release the pressure.

Throw away the deadline. Get it out of your mind. You don’t need to have your life figured out by a certain date. It’s very unlikely that everything will go according to your timeline anyway. So release it. I heard this song called Release by Ronnie Freeman, which is stunning and perfect for this blog post and this line wrecked me “I might never know what You have for, ‘til I let go of the crumbs I’ve been carrying, finally sit down at the feast You’ve prepared for me.” Let go of the timeline so that you can enter into what’s in front you.

We need a greater imagination.

So often we’re defeated when our dreams don’t materialize at the timing we expect because we don’t have a bigger view. We don’t think that greater things are happening. And those things don’t have to be limited to us. They can be great things for the other people in our lives, both near and far. I get so tied down to my own vision that I can’t see a greater vision when I receive something better than what I asked for. We need to be willing to gain a wider perspective so that we don’t lose heart when our timelines don’t come to pass.

Related Post: Dreams, Grief, and Fruit

Who told you?

Who told you that time was running out? Who told you that there was a clock to follow? Who told you that it was now or never? Sometimes well-meaning people in our lives, usually family, try to urge us into situations where they believe time is of the essence. Although they have good intentions, it is so incredibly harmful to listen to them. You can end up feeling defeated by not meeting their “perfect” timing, whether that’s in your career or romantically.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people with this sense of urgency feel so brokenhearted because their story didn’t go according to “plan.” If that’s you, begin to distance yourself. Ask yourself whose timeline are you on? Because you’re not whoever is trying to give you advice. Timelines aren’t all the same. Don’t be discouraged when you are seeing things happen for others that aren’t happening for you. It usually means something else is happening for you right now, and that’s okay.

Embrace the life you have now.

Do the things you love. Be with friends. Challenge yourself to read a hard book. Try a new hobby. Take steps to move forward in that area of life that you want, but ultimately, don’t stress yourself out. It’s not up to you to make something happen. You are not a genie. You are human. Which means there are other forces in the world making it run, so you can breathe. Embrace the timing of your life. Embrace what you have now, and trust that in perfect timing, good things are coming!

Signing off, 

Gigi