Not Ready

When Timing is Everything

Fully grown adults are often heard saying they’re not ready. Frequently, not being ready is related to the most important relationships they’ll have in life. The ones with their husband or wife and eventually, children.

Sometimes not being ready is a form of self-sabotage related to the so called, “imposter syndrome” people claim to have around their life, career or business. They tell themselves they don’t have enough degrees or experience, reviews or revenue. If they can’t claim to be an expert yet, they should wait until they have their own success story.

Other times people say they’re not ready because of their fear of being seen. They don’t want to be visible because of some personal insecurity about how they look or speak. Their home or office isn’t YouTube worthy. Their life isn’t picture perfect.

No one tells people the truth. That they’ll never be ready. That life happens while you’re getting ready. And that life will pass you by while you’re waiting to be ready.

Sometimes you won’t know what you need to do to get ready until you choose it. Only once you’re in it can you know how to prepare your heart and mind, your life and yourself for the unknowns and uncertainty of a new challenge.

Even the people who think they’re ready, actually aren’t. They can’t be. Because there’s no way to be completely ready for something you’ve never done before. Even couples who wait until they’re financially ready, have no way of knowing how to get ready for the forever life-altering changes that come with a newborn.

If you wait until you’re ready, you’ll be waiting forever. Because that day never comes. You just have to do the thing and find out along the way what it will require of you. And there’s no way to know that until you do it.

The truth is, people often say they’re not ready when what they actually mean is they don’t really want the thing they’re delaying indefinitely. Procrastination is not laziness and a lack of motivation. It reveals what people really value over what they think they should do.

Better just to be honest with yourself about what you’re willing and not willing to do. Tell the truth about what you really want instead of lying about not being ready to do it. Because sometimes not being ready is the lie you tell yourself when you don’t want to do the work required to reach a goal or fulfill a dream. It’s the lie that obscures the truth about the sacrifices you don’t want to make to achieve the thing you say you want.

Once you’re clear on your own values and committed to honoring them, you can focus on your timing. Because being ready or not ready is not the question. The question is: when is the time?

I wasn’t ready to get pregnant the first time. At least not emotionally. It wasn’t the “right” time. I would have preferred to enjoy being a newlywed couple and married life for a few years before having children. But children don’t come at the right time, they always come at the perfect time.

Timing is an important factor often overlooked. But without the awareness of time, you can miss your window of opportunity…forever. And once it’s gone, you can’t get it back.

Time waits for no man.

~ Choi Hong Hi

I learned about the importance of timing in my studies of three of my areas of interest and expertise - early childhood education, classical feng shui and a woman’s fertility.

In the Montessori philosophy of education, Maria teaches about something she called the Sensitive Periods. Being an early childhood educator, she focused on the sensitive periods for children between the ages of 0-6. In The Absorbent Mind, she taught that there were sensitive periods for learning and that if they missed them, it would make knowledge and skills far more difficult to learn and master later. Many of the adults who talk about childhood trauma or having to heal their inner child, experienced things that scarred them for life and caused them to miss these sensitive periods in which they would have learned how to mature and master themselves.

It is the child who makes the man,

and no man exists who was not made by the child he once was.

~ Maria Montessori

In the West, a lot of attention is placed on the feng shui remedies themselves. Like interior decorating, the focus is on the item and the location of the item. But what Westerners often fail to take into consideration is the entire concept of the appropriate timing of placing your remedies and enhancements. When you place an annual remedy in a sector, what date you turn on a water fountain and which weeks in the year are considered the “safe” windows for renovations in your particular home, are just as important as the remedy itself. This is why we review, renew and refresh our feng shui each year and ideally, every month.

You can access all of this important monthly feng shui information by becoming a paid subscriber of the Feng Shui Yourself blog on Substack.

Because female fertility is limited to a few decades of their life, women are conscious of their ticking biological clock. If they ignore their intuitive desire to find a mate and make babies, they squander those years on pursuing endless degrees and climbing the corporate ladder, staying in dead end relationships or indulging in all the single life fun. Instead of wisely utilizing their fertility window, they focus on trying to extend it with medical interventions. Unplanned or not, either way, they risk missing out on being a wife and mother. Marriage and motherhood pass them by because they dishonored their own values or simply put off honoring them too long, comforting themselves with the lie that they can have it all and that they have all the time in the world.

Whatever it is you want to do, begin. Start before you’re ready. And then, like on-the-job training, learn as you go. Live the life you came to live. Ready or not.

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Pearls of Wisdom is a personal blog of the wisdom writings of Dara Eden that fall outside the realms of feng shui, The 8 Elements and her other personal energy work. Established in 2014, the blog is an expression of her highest values: Sovereignty, Truth, Wisdom & Inner Peace. It’s devoted to increasing awareness, expanding consciousness, bringing knowledge, sharing innerstandings and offering wisdom to the sovereign souls inhabiting the Earth.

Dara Eden is a writer and wisdom keepHER. The name, Dara, means “pearl of wisdom”. Pearls are formed when a microscopic irritant, like a grain of sand, embeds itself within the soft tissue of a shelled mollusk. To protect itself, the oyster or clam covers the invading gritty particle with concentric layers of iridescent crystalline calcium to form treasures, pearls of great beauty and worth. Gifts of the sea, pearls are the oldest known gem and the only gem that does not need to be cut, shaped or polished. Pearls are associated with elegance and luxury and are a symbol of mystery and purity. Pearls represent priceless knowledge, the rare wisdom that begins as a tiny, random, common irritant.