Memories of summer
Whether you’re a late bloomer or an early bloomer it doesn’t matter. However you are in different aspects of your life, you are right on time.
Right on Time
“…tadpoles don’t begin to metamorphose into full frogs until a not-very-precise range of three to twenty-two months thereafter, meaning tadpoles may overwinter, waiting for the moment to be just right. Amazing. It makes me think I’m right on schedule; this life-change stuff takes time.” — Margaret Roach, And I shall have some peace there
Too often in my life I’ve (in the words of Anne Lamott) compared my insides to other people’s outsides. And then I felt that I was out of step with the world. For a long time I tried to “catch up” with where I thought I should be. It never worked.
I was a late bloomer most of my life. As an adolescent I was socially awkward and painfully self-conscious. When I look back to those days I wish I had had someone to tell me, “No matter how you are, you’re right on time.”
Making Choices
At the age of 17 I started college as an art major. But I found I didn’t fit in as an art student and quickly changed majors. Forty years later as a software engineer in a large corporation I was blessed with a job layoff just when I knew I needed to embrace my love of photography and follow my creative longings.
Was I forty years late in making the leap? No. I was right on time. My kids were grown. I had discovered my passion for photography just two years earlier. A month before the layoff I met a woman in Hawaii who encouraged me to ask myself what it was that I really needed and wanted. How frugally could I live? Did I want to continue to work in the corporate world? Instead of asking if I could afford to do what I love, she asked me if I could afford to continue to live without doing what I love.
I knew that it was time to move on even before the layoff. It was time to make a change. Somehow I had gone from, “I’m making a living,” to “This work is killing me.” It’s been eight years since that layoff and I never would have imagined how perfectly my life would unfold.
My metamorphosis from uptight software engineer to joy-filled photographer and writer took time. I could not have planned how this creative life would unfold.
Bloom when you are ready
The older I get the more I believe that things usually happen when they are meant to happen, not when I think they should happen. When I relax into a belief that everything is fine and that all is happening right on time, I feel a spaciousness and ease in my life. I give myself permission to trust that I am right on time.
I never could have imagined where the journey would take me or how much joy I would experience.
Even when I get impatient or scared (and believe me I DO get impatient and scared far more often than I’d like) I KNOW that peace and serenity are available to me if I simply accept that all is happening right on time.
There are many things in life that I cannot choose. But I can choose to believe that everything is happening at just the right time and that I am right on time.
How about you? Are you feeling that you are right on time?
May you walk in beauty.
Happy Easter and Happy Passover everyone!
Female wood duck in the pond
Soft morning light in the neighborhood
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