There is a prevailing myth about perfect timing that is begging to be debunked. How many of us have said "if only the timing were right" and lived on regrets? I used to join swimming competitions. When the time comes for your event, you go up the diving board of your assigned lane, and you wait for the sound that signals the start, and you dive in the moment you hear it. You have to have the perfect timing. A second later and you lose out, a second sooner and it doesn't count. But it happens sometimes. Someone would get a little excited and dive in before the official start. This is anticipated so the rules have factored this in. It's called a false start. When it happens, you get to try again. It is a competition and human errors are allowed. And yet we are often unforgiving when we find ourselves in situations that are similar to that false start. Many of us even have timelines. At this age, I must do this. At that age, I must do that. By this time, I should make this much money. By that time, I should have met the love of my life. And when things do not turn out as planned, we start to feel like failures. We say should have, could have, would have, if only this, if only that. The truth is, it is never a straight path from A to B. Life is complicated and sometimes difficult, but it is also full of joy and inspiration and beautiful events. We tend to forget that as long as we are alive, we get a new start with every breath that we take. We get a second chance and a third chance and a fourth chance- in fact, we get unlimited chances. We get to start again anytime that we want. I think an exercise we can do to let go of this perfect timing myth is to look into a situation where we might still be holding on to some regrets. Perhaps we blamed ourselves. If I were more of this and less of that, if this happened 3 months sooner, if I had said something different at that time, things might be different. Perhaps. But to speculate on something that we have no control of and cannot change does not give us freedom or peace of mind. It would help us more to just acknowledge what happened, accept it, and start to release it. Release the person or situation over whom or which we still have feelings of regret. It may help to visualize that we are cutting the cords between ourselves and the situation. We are letting it go. Letting it float away. Releasing it to where it belongs, not with us but with the past. We are going to have false starts. We are human after all. But it is a myth to believe that our happiness lays on a fragile house of cards, that we get the timing wrong and we are forever doomed. That is only our insecurity speaking. Those timelines are not real, our pressures self-created. Time is democratic and forgiving. We have access to it now just as we have always had access to it from the first breath that we took. And regardless of how many false starts we make, in this life we need not compete with anyone, and in this life we are never disqualified. We get to start again. And again. And again. All the time. Perfect timing is just a myth. We can keep holding on to it if we want to punish ourselves, or we can let go of it if we want our freedom back. We always have a choice.
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