Timing

Timing is the one thing that we often forget to surrender to.

Things are dark until they’re not. Most of our unhappiness stems from the belief that our lives should be different than they are. We believe we have control — and our self-loathing and self-hatred comes from this idea that we should be able to change our circumstances, that we should be richer or hotter or better or happier. While self-responsibility is empowering, it can often lead to this resentment and bitterness that none of us need to be holding within us. We have to put in our best efforts and then give ourselves permission to let whatever happens to happen—and to not feel so directly and vulnerably tied to outcomes. Opportunities often don’t show up in the way we think they will.

You don’t need more motivation or inspiration to create the life you want. You need less shame around the idea that you’re not doing your best. You need to stop listening to people who are in vastly different life circumstances and life stages than you tell you that you’re just not doing or being enough. You need to let timing do what it needs to do. You need to see lessons where you see barriers. You need to understand that what’s right now becomes inspiration later. You need to see that wherever you are now is what becomes your identity later.

From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-varon/to-anyone-who-thinks-theyre-falling-behind_b_9190758.html

I am trying to make sense of the above. Or maybe make peace with it.

I am so profoundly unhappy I can't see straight. I am seconds away from being completely undone by the story that my life has been a series of terrible mistakes.

Except of course as soon as I type that, I know it's not true. It's really just the last 4 years I really haven't liked. The last four years where it felt like a lot of big things got taken out of our hands. The last four years where the illusion that we were making choices was finally shown for what it is - just make-believe. 

I thought we'd get to choose more. But I mostly know that life chooses us. The journey through our 20s and 30s is a journey toward realizing that we've chosen very little - maybe the knobs on the cabinets in a house that was built long before we showed up. The foundation, the size, the number of rooms of our House Life: all those were not choices at all, though it was fun to pretend I suppose. 

I know all this, have known it for years, and yet. And yet.

I am ready to choose something. I want to move a wall or build a new wing. I want to pack up the whole thing and move it a few (hundred) miles down the road. But so far, life is not yielding to my plans and appears resolute in limiting my options to moving the pictures around, or maybe bringing in a houseplant. 

There were a lot of loud voices in my life telling us we got to choose, and that in fact every moment was an opportunity to Choose Wisely. That the Wrong Choice could wreck everything and before we knew it, we'd be walking with the devil straight to eternal terrible. It's odd to me that I've rejected that entire theology so entirely and yet, am absolutely managed by it in this current storm. I can not shake the belief that at some point in the last 48 months, we disobeyed, chose the wrong thing and are perilously close to being lost forever.  I am certain that we are supposed to be doing something altogether other than what we're doing and that the reason I don't know what it is is because of sin, because I'm not listening, because of Something I've Done.

Sigh. The certainly is so small, but SO LOUD. What curses we have been fed, dressed up as blessings. 

Maybe we need an exorcism...