“I can’t wait for everything to be ok for me to choose to be ok…because if I wait for everything to be ok, I will never be ok.  I don’t want to wait for things to be perfect before I choose to live life to the fullest.  There’s things [going on] that we can’t control, but what can we control?  We can control the fact that we’re going to choose to be ok,” JB Copeland.  What a perfectly balanced perspective on mindset and action.  The concept of waiting for things to be ok/right/perfect/right timing is predicated on outside factors aligning how we feel they should.  There are so many sayings that directly conflict each other in terms of action and the what/how/when we should do things that we create confusion and misunderstanding about priority and action in our lives.  We talk about the right timing, like waiting for our ducks to be in a row, to have all of our pieces before we begin, making sure we are prepared and that directly opposes things telling us to take the leap, we will never be ready, it will never be all perfect.  In either case, we are not taught to trust ourselves.  Trust is the key. 

Life is a mix of knowing when to wait and when to move and understanding we can’t control everything, not all of life will play out how we plan it.  Things fall apart and change and move, and we start to change and move and develop new ideas of what we want and what makes sense for us.  We can’t stick with an idea of how we want things to be just because that is what we planned years ago—we need to be able to let go of what isn’t working.  Just because things get a little unsteady (and even when they seem to fall apart entirely) it doesn’t mean that we can’t choose a new course of action.  We can get buried or we can build.  Either way, it depends on us and how we want to approach it.  We can decide and plan and make moves, that is always true, but we have to decide the most prudent move to make based on where we are at, what we know, and what may get us closest to the goal.  We also have to know when to pivot the goal and aim for something else.  That, too, involves entirely trusting ourselves and that depends more on knowing/being clear on who we are rather than making sure we feel ok. 

I often get frustrated at the scenarios where it seems people are deciding the outcome of my life for me.  A silly but pertinent example is driving.  It isn’t my fault you’re running late and speed around me when I’m already doing 5-10 over the speed limit.  Or why did you choose to inappropriately enter traffic when I’m already at speed causing me to slow down for you?  I don’t like it when I have to alter the course of my actions for the sake of someone else’s ignorance.  The same can be said when major changes happen—changes as I’ve described at my 9-5 that are deeply unsettling and entirely unexpected.  I could sit and wait for decisions to be made regarding my specific function and do nothing on a daily basis.  Or I can continue on my path, on my projects working on the pieces that make sense for me to work on and doing what I am supposed to do until a decision has been made otherwise.  It isn’t easy.  I still feel like my fate is ultimately in someone else’s hands.  The truth is, it is.  I have no say in when the company will decide to do the next round of changes and I have no idea if I will be involved in that.  All I can do is what I’ve been hired to do on a daily basis.  Now that doesn’t mean I’m ignorant and waiting for the ball to drop.  No.  I’m simultaneously networking and making other connections to keep possibilities open.  I have no idea which way things will go, but if I wait for that decision to me made I will end up stuck here or completely out on my ass.          

As trite/cliché as it may sound, we have always turned out alright.  Alright in the regard that we are alive and we have another opportunity to make things better, different, to change our focus.  I’m not saying that we aren’t a little beaten up for it or a little scarred, but with the premise that we can only control what we can control, the truth is if we are alive and breathing we have the chance to do things differently and to do them again.  Whether or not that feels good, feels right, feels fair, feels like what we want it to be is all irrelevant.  We are still here and moving forward, making our own decisions, choosing to take what we can from whatever situation comes our way, and do actively do something with it.  And if we wait for the right moment for everything, we will waste the time and life we had available while it was here.  The last thing we want to do is look back and regret the things we could have simply chosen to do differently.  And I say simple—I didn’t say easy.  I have a lot of pieces I’ve shared about that distinction so don’t get upset about it.  The decision is simple: we don’t want to feel a certain way, we don’t want to wait.  The fact is there are somethings in our lives we have to jump hurdles in order to take the action we need, and sometimes those hurdles are still in our mind, and sometimes they are very real.  But with everything, we can decide to keep practicing so the jump becomes easier or we can continue fighting the walls as we try to walk around the hurdle.  The point is the hurdle won’t go away in either situation—the choice is ours how we get around it.