How do we get to our future?
Once again, my writing ramblings – all prepared and ready to go – have taken a backseat. I can see the words huddled together, huffed and bereft on a chair in the corner, but it just wasn’t the right time for them to be released into the world. Everything has its time and words are no different. When that little voice in my head tells me that something isn’t right, I’m happy to listen – despite my propensity to go full steam ahead in true Aries fashion (for those who believe in that sort of thing).
Instead, I felt prompted to write about meeting people. I don’t mean widening a social circle or planning to meet with friends or family. I’m thinking more about meeting people where they are in their life. There’s so much we can learn from others and so much we can inspire people to learn from us … but the time has to be right. A bit akin to reading a book which doesn’t have much impact but then, years later, the very same book comes to mean so much more to us depending on our circumstances in life at that precise moment.
I recently listened to, and read, a lot of thoughts and reflections in the lead up to the Easter weekend: articles, sermons, TV programmes, radio programmes etc. usually focussing on the Easter story with which most people are familiar. But one of the best things I heard was in relation to Mary Magdalene uncovering the empty tomb and what happened in the following hours and days and why: the message being that some people were just not ready to hear what she had to say.
This was my inspiration to think about this underlying meaning in relation to meeting people where they are in their journey through life … not in terms of trying to change them, and not trying to replicate them, but instead allowing people to be their own unique self, while also allowing ourselves to be who we are too. A kind of mutual loving acceptance.
None of us are the same people we were last week, last month or last year. It would be worrying if we were! We all have experiences which don’t inherently change us, but which nudge us along in terms of understanding, compassion, and our own self-awareness - experiences which perhaps shine a light on corners of us which just need a bit of clearing out.
Communication and community can help us to exchange our experiences and ideas and often offer a much needed hand of friendship, although we aren’t always at the point to accept these gestures. But good things come to those who wait, and those exchanges eventually bear fruit when the time is right and we’re ready for change to happen – changes that will enrich our lives and help us to better understand ourselves and others.
In our friendship groups and communities, people come and go - some stay for a short while, some for a longer period of time, others move out of our reach in a different direction, but each will have helped our own journey in some way, as ours will have helped theirs.
Experience has taught me that sometimes, chance meetings, random conversations, or lost and found friendships can hold little sense or significance at the time of their occurrence … a time when we just weren’t ready for them. We can find ourselves frustrated, annoyed, mystified. Yet months or even years later, each of these situations can come to mean a whole lot more when the scattered dots, gifted to us over time, finally align and join themselves together to create that sweet spot where each of us is ready to listen, to accept, and to grow.
That’s when the magic happens.
That’s how we get to our future.