“As soon as this work project gets done.”
“As soon as we get more settled in.”
“As soon as I’m done planning this event.”
“As soon as the kids are older.”
How commonly do we offer these postponements to personal urges and others-issued invitations to take a trip, make a move, or simply hang out?
“Things are busy right now,” we tell ourselves. “But in a week/month/year, my calendar will be much freer. Good times are right around the corner!”
There is a bit of truth to this. Different seasons in life are certainly more and less busy. Parents of toddlers will find their bandwidth more burdened than parents of school-age children. Retirees have much more discretionary time than young turks still scaling the professional ladder.
And yet, no matter what stage of it you’re in, life never seems to entirely open up. It never becomes so unencumbered, that you practically can’t help but follow through on your good-times intentions.
If time was the determining factor in one’s availability for fun and adventure, then you wouldn’t find families with young kids who still travel, nor retirees who do nothing but stay home and watch TV.
Doing the things you really want to do is not a function of fullness of schedule, but determination of heart.
At a certain point you have to countenance the fact that you’re not going through an atypically busy season; that work and obligations and responsibilities are not short-term aberrations from normal life, but permanent, inherent fixtures of it.
At a certain point you have to realize that there is no corner. That life is instead one long, perennially-cluttered corridor, and when it comes to saying yes to that literal or metaphorical party, now’s as good a time as any.
