Hopeless, Helpless or Just Waiting
From our earliest days, we are encouraged to engage.
“Take control of your career”, “Quiet kids get nowt”, “If you don’t ask them out, someone else will”.
We are bombarded by these messages from cradle to grave. But how would our lives be if we recognised that sometimes, just sometimes, waiting is actually the best thing we could do. Consider the message we are so often given “Strike while the iron’s hot. It’s a useful perspective, powering us to action in the right circumstances. But what happens when the circumstances are not right?
As a medium, I spend so much of my time having to acknowledge that from time to time, Spirit involve themselves in my life in some subtle, and no so subtle ways.
Recently, I needed a surgeon. The why’s and wherefores of it don’t matter. The key point is that my insurers found a perfect match for my needs. The problem was, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get hold of his medical secretary in order to book an appointment. It got to the stage that I was considering giving up on my perfect candidate in favour of a less than ideal fit for my needs. Then all of a sudden, he answered the phone number I’d understood to be that of his medical secretary, and I had an appointment with him the next day. Only later did it start to dawn on me that in the interim, I’d spent many hours asking myself what it was that I wanted him to do, how I’d know how to trust him when we met, so many questions…. And the delay was actually vital, because it gave me time, time I didn’t know I needed, to come to terms with the suddenly changed future caused by the chest injury I needed him to fix for me. Had I gone along headlong when I thought I was ready, I’d have run into some pretty big questions left unanswered, that would have made for some pretty serious decisions that I would have been unprepared to make. Instead, perhaps by the hand of Spirit, I was delayed long enough to make those decisions, for both me and my surgeon to be ready for the long, complex process that then ensued.
Sometimes, the delay is in order to allow others to catch up. After graduation, I decided on a career change that on the face of it, should not have been too complex. I applied to a company where I believed I would be a good fit, who seemed perfectly happy to consider my complete change of vocation, all seemed well. Then they came back and said I’d done so badly in their logic tests that they no longer saw me as a good fit. Reader, I was devastated. I went into a spiral that lasted some ten months, thinking that I was never going to take off. Ten months later, the HR department of the company got back to me to ask if I was still interested in the role. It turned out tat they had failed so many potential candidates, they had to acknowledge that the fault was with their logic tests, and not with the slew of potential candidates they had rejected on the basis of their results in those tests. Cutting to the chase, I changed job, career and city, all in the space of a few weeks. Not long after doing so, I also met my husband of now some 36 years. I later learned that he had made some similar changes in parallel with mine. Had I arrived in the city ten months earlier, it’s arguable that we would never have met, let alone built our family together.
Sometimes, sometimes when we want a delay least of all, when we are champing at the bit, Spirit will intervene to change the timescales for us. That may be by slowing us down in our own process in ways that are obvious, or it may be simply by causing us to “mark step” while other events catch us up. These times can be incredibly frustrating. They can last a day, a month, sometimes a year. But however unpleasant, they are essential to allow events to take place in a connected, coherent, joined-up fashion.
The trick is to recognise those times when, no matter how well planned and well intended our actions might be, nothing seems to move us forward. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because the time isn’t right yet. Every time I’ve been “held” in this way, things have suddenly resolved when the time is right and events, over which had no control, have caught up. The trick is, when you’ve done everything right and still nothing happens, to try to be patient and anticipate the time when events will carry you forward again.
There is always a tomorrow. We just sometimes need to wait for it to arrive, rather than chasing after it prematurely.
Alexander Dalgleish-Weaver
