Time.

As a therapist I hear things like, “It’s too late to do XYZ now,” or “If I were younger this is what I’d change in my life,” pretty often. As a human, the thoughts of, “I’m running out of time” scare me to death. Well, I suppose what really scares me is that I’m at the point where my life is half over and that I’ve already lived more days than I have left. Of course there is no way to know this, but let’s assume I live to what the life expectancy is for most people. That’s a hard reality. So I run, as fast as I can, to live as much life as possible until I can’t anymore.

The beautiful thing is that every day that God wakes you up, you have a new opportunity to do XYZ. This gives me motivation to do things that bring me happiness, even if I am doing some of them alone. Life has value and I don’t intend to miss any beautiful moments because I feel “too old” to have them.

I had planned on going to college directly out of high school, but it turned out that I needed to work for awhile before I could enroll. So at twenty-three when most people were graduating, I was starting. After getting my associate degree, I needed to leave school and work and did so until I started my BA program which I didn’t graduate from until I was thirty-one. After I got my Bachelor degree I was right back to work. And it took until I was thirty-nine to earn my M.Ed.

Childern was always in my plan. If everything else in my life fell apart, I knew I wanted kids and I knew I’d be an amazing mother. My upbringing taught me exactly what not to do, so I felt like I’d been in training for children all my life. I had my first daughter at twenty-eight. and my second at thirty-five. I had been told I was a high risk pregnancy with my second because of being in an “advanced age.” At thirty-five, people I graduated with were grandparents or had adult children.

And despite being previously engaged and in a couple of long term relationships, I was forty-one before I ever got married. Most people I knew had been married and divorced at least twice and still wasn’t living happily. That was something you could never deny about me; I didn’t do things I didn’t want to do and I took my time to make sure I was making a good solid decision at the time.

The point is to not allow time to work against you but for you. If you’re not on the same track as everyone else, who cares? Every day, every hour, and each minute that you are alive you have opportunities to create the life you want. It’s not too late, and when it is, you won’t wake up in the morning. Stop complaining about what you don’t have right now and get your butt in motion to work toward what you want.

“How time passes depends on how you move.” Albert Einstein