Ready or Not

Photo by Zach Lucero on Unsplash

You’ve probably heard of an epiphany. A point in your life where something becomes clear to you in a whole new light and you grasp the essential meaning of it. You wake up one day and you have this great conviction that there is a new perspective on how you’ve always seen things. And seeing this new perspective elevates you one step up the ladder that is your life. I don’t truly believe that birthdays are the doorways to new chapters in our lives. The true doorways are those moments when we begin to see things differently from how we’ve always seen them.

I had such a revelation some time back. I should start with a little back story, though. I am what people would call rigid and inflexible and overall too serious with life. I like making plans for everything, up to the very last detail. If I fail to do that, then my mind will have a party convincing me that the thing I am doing will fail because I didn’t have a plan. I guess I grew up reading too many quotes that said, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,” and took them to heart. It’s a notion that has been drilled into our heads since we were children.

So it’s always the same Ferris wheel ride for me. When I want to do something, I spend an insane amount of time just reading about it or planning how I’m going to do it, and in the end, I never get it done. John Green described this mental state perfectly.