“It was just the wrong time.”
“I wasn’t ready.”
“I wasn’t in the right place for that to happen.”

Regardless of who we are, what we look like, what our passions and dreams are, we know one thing for certain: no one is immune to the effects of time. Sometimes, the right moment shows up at the right time and everything goes your way. And sometimes it doesn’t.

And sometimes it doesn’t…repeatedly.

There are days where doors that you think will stay open suddenly close, right when you felt like you would finally enter; and no amount of knocking will open them again. There are moments that pass by in a mere flash, only long enough for us to see what might’ve been. There are times where we pass on a chance to fly because we are too busy checking our wings for damages, only to realize too late we could’ve flown all along. And then we look around, and everyone else is flying. Or it feels like it.

It’s easy to feel discouraged, to beat ourselves up for not jumping at chances when we held them in our hands.

I’m a firm believer that we all have a purpose in this life. We all have dreams to achieve and goals to pursue. We have people to love and ideas to see through. And I’m a firm believer that sometimes, time just isn’t on our side. Sometimes life throws options to us that we just don’t feel ready for, and when we are ready, those options are nowhere to be seen. We worry about all our missed chances while time just passes us by, and we don’t give a second thought until it’s so far in front of us. Hindsight is always 20/20 and it’s always the part we want to rewind.

Sometimes, when we look back, we can see that paths we did choose were taken a poor time in our lives. We wish we could restart and try that path again, maybe actually making something from it instead of taking it for granted.

Time is important. We can’t pretend like it isn’t, because timing affects so many aspects of our lives. Sometimes though, the problem isn’t time. The problem is us. We are too busy standing still, waiting for our time to come and watching everyone else to see how we compare. We are replaying all the chances that we could’ve been ready. Or that we were almost prepared. That we might’ve done it, if we weren’t so afraid.

We have to stop beating ourselves up over the chances that have already come and gone, and we have to stop standing in one place waiting for our door to open.

The only way doors will ever open in our lives, the only way paths will be clear enough to see, is when we stop looking, and we start living. One day we won’t have any breath in our lungs left, and I pray that we don’t spend our final days wishing we had actually lived our lives instead of actually living them for ourselves.

Our time will come. Until then, make the most of today.