I know a man that has been a distant friend for many years. I know his family and hear from him from time to time. He’s well educated and capable of doing many things, but he has one problem that has kept him from achieving much in his life, either personally or professionally. He can’t seem to live in the present. He constantly says things like, “After this happens, I’ll do that. After I get done with this, then I’ll look at that. Pretty soon the time will be right, but just not now.” He’s been talking about the same goals he wants to achieve for decades but hasn’t moved any closer to them in all that time. He keeps waiting for the perfect time, which never arrives.
He talks about the past a lot, what he did as a kid, what he did in high school and college. He has a vast photo collection encompassing years of his life, and his favorite past time is to pull them out and nostalgically talk about the good old days. His entire adult life has been one of reflecting on where he’s been, and waiting for things to start. He’s either living in the past or waiting for the future. He just can’t seem to move forward. He can’t get out of the gate.
There is nothing wrong with remembering times from our pasts. There is nothing wrong with waiting until the right time to begin doing the things we want to do. But if we get hung up on waiting for the PERFECT time to come along, we may find ourselves in this same situation. There are few times in our lives when everything comes together perfectly. They just don’t happen that often. If we wait for that to happen before we actually begin to live our lives, we may find that our lives have gone by, and we have done nothing. And that would be terrible. There is an old saying that when we’re dying we won’t regret what we’ve done, we’ll regret what we haven’t done. I believe there’s truth in that.
The best time to do what we want to do is now. The best time to start achieving our goals is now. There will never be a better time to begin to plan. Maybe circumstances aren’t ideal, and you’ll have a delay, but if we don’t make a plan to resume going forward we could get stuck. We are the only ones in control of our lives but we actually have to decide to take that control and use it. Lots of things will pull on us – our families, our responsibilities, our jobs, our commitments. But if we want to own our lives, we must find a way to manage those things and not allow them to manage us.
It’s a new day every day. If we take some time – today – to begin to plan what we’ve put off, it will be the first step. And every journey begins with the first step. If you’ve been waiting, postponing, or procrastinating, now is the time to stop. Start moving. Do one thing to end the inertia. And then tomorrow, do the next thing. One thing will lead to another, and soon the goal will be in sight. Start today. The future is there waiting for you
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