As I approach the end of my first trimester and watch the ebb and flow of grief, I’m learning that certain experiences won’t be rushed, no matter how much you’d like them to be.
Now… or not at all 🔗
There’s so little we are willing to wait for—I want it only if I can have it now. Wants evaporate quickly when it becomes clear we have to invest effort over time for an uncertain result.
If I could guarantee someone wouldn’t experience and die of a painful cancer by making these difficult lifestyle choices now—just enough real food, plentiful sleep and exercise—most people wouldn’t take me up on it. For most of us, what is happening now and in the very near future (tomorrow and the upcoming work week) is all we can see with some certainty. Everything else we see and experience comes and goes quickly—the thing you saw on social media that was funny for a moment, but what was it again?; the stuff happening in the lives of your “good friends”; the ongoing saga and reporting of campus protests; etc.
The worst part about it is the irony. Your attempts to keep up with everything—to keep up with pop culture, with the memes, with the news, with your friends, with your family—means you have actually kept up with nothing. You are walking through life involuntarily reacting to the demands of those immediately around you, and you have voluntarily invested in nothing at all.
Your life is dictated by the present, by the tempo of others, and one day, you will fully wake from the daze to realize that your life is just like that social media post you thought was cool, but when pressed, you can’t remember who posted it, what they were actually doing, or why you thought it was cool.
But maybe? 🔗
No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.
Warren Buffett
Some things just won’t be rushed: pregnancy, but also recovering from a broken bone, reinventing what your job is and what it means to you, integrating a new habit or mindset into your life, and grief from the loss of something or someone beloved.
The unfortunate thing is that we benefit from a dedicated support system when we experience these things—ideally one where they are practicing or experiencing something new and difficult, but it’s easy for friends, family, and acquaintances to “forget” that these things take time—a long time. Every step these “journeys” presents its own challenges, and while the timelines will vary from individual to individual, someone who has experienced something similar will feel the truth of “it’s a process.”
In the midst of pregnancy, a work-self and work-life reinvention, and grief, time has felt like it’s been dragging—it stubbornly won’t be rushed and keeps to its own time. I am living life in a reality where time marches to a different tempo than someone who lives one social media post to another, one work day to another, one news cycle to another.
A life in transition is a life of constantly trying to assert an evolving identity, and I can’t help but think that some of the people in my life must be left behind in the process.