If You Think You Are Falling Behind in Life

You do not need more motivation. You do not need to be inspired to action. You do not need to read any more lists and posts about how you are not doing enough. We act as if by worrying we can add a cubit to a string of our hair. We act as if we can read enough articles and enough quotes, and suddenly the little switch in our brain will put us into action.

But, honestly, here is the thing that nobody really talks about when it comes to success and motivation and willpower and goals and productivity and all those little buzzwords that have come into popularity: you are as you are until you are not. You change when you want to change. You put your ideas into action in the timing that is best. That is just how it happens and it is often than not referred to as 'God's time'.

And what I think we all need more than anything is this: permission to be wherever we are when we are there.

You are not a robot. You can not just conjure up motivation when you do not have it. Sometimes you are going through something. Sometimes life has happened. Life! Remember life? Yeah, it teaches you things and sometimes makes you go the long way around for your biggest lessons.

You do not get to control everything. You can wake up at 5am every day until you are tired and broken, but if the words or the painting or the ideas do not want to come to fruition, they won't. You can show up every day to your best intentions, but if it is not the time, it is just not the time. You need to give yourself permission to be a human being.

Sometimes the novel is not ready to be written because you have not met the inspiration for your main character yet. Sometimes you need two more years of life experience before you can make your masterpiece into something that will feel real and true and raw to other people. Sometimes you are not falling in love because whatever you need to know about yourself is only knowable through solitude. Sometimes you have not met your next collaborator. Sometimes your sadness encircles you because, one day, it will be the opus upon which you build your life.

We all know this: Our experience cannot always be manipulated. Yet, we do not act as though we know this truth. We try so hard to manipulate and control our lives, to make creativity into a game to win, to shortcut success because others say they have, to process emotions and uncertainty as if these are linear journeys.

You do not get to game the system of your life. You just do not! You do not get to control every outcome and aspect as a way to never give in to the uncertainty and unpredictability of something that is beyond what you understand. It is the basis of presence: to show up as you are in this moment and let that be enough.

Yet, we do not act in a way that supports this lifestyle. We fill every minute with productivity tools and read 30-point lists on how to better drive out natural, human impulse. We often forget that we are as we are until we are not. We are the same until we are changed. We can move that a bit further by putting into place healthy habits and to show up to our lives in a way that fosters growth, but we can not game timing.

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

Things are dark until they are 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 do not show up in the way we think they will.

You do not need more motivation or inspiration to create the life you want. You need less shame around the idea that you are 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 are 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 is right now becomes inspiration later. You need to see that wherever you are now is what becomes your identity later.

Sometimes we are not yet the people we need to be in order to contain the desires we have. Sometimes we have to let ourselves evolve into the place where we can allow what we want to transpire.

Let's just say that whatever you want, you want it enough. So much so that you are making yourself miserable in order to achieve it. What about chilling out? Maybe your motivation isn't the problem, but that you keep pushing a boulder up a mountain that only grows in size the more you push.

There is a 'magic' beyond us that works in ways we can not understand. We can not game it. We can not 10-point list it. We can not control it. We have to just let it be, to take a step back for a moment, stop beating ourselves up into oblivion, and to let the cogs turn as they will. One day, this moment will make sense. The magical miracle of God's time will come to play in the game! Trust that! Give yourself the permission to trust that!

Just as the psalmist puts it in Psalm 16:6, surely, "the lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage." and as saith the LORD in Jeremiah 29:11 "I know the thoughts that I think towards you: thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end."; even for this reason, let go and let God!