The Danger of Waiting Until the "Right Time"
I put off working more on my spiritual and personal growth until after a trip. Then I became seriously ill, my mother-in-law died, and I became ill again.
The wallpaper that I use on my work and personal computers is a calendar that I make and update each month in Canva. On my work laptop, the calendar is still March of 2025. In some ways, I feel like I am still existing at the end of March while the rest of the world is in mid-June. I walk outside and I’m surprised that it’s hot. I wrote in a treatment plan that an objective would be completed in 6 months and when my documentation software auto-populated completion in December 2025, at first I thought it was a glitch. 2025 is halfway over and I lost 3 months of it.
I do know what happened at least.
At the end of March, I took a trip with a friend to Gatlinburg, TN and then visited my parents in Asheville, NC. 12 hours after I arrived home, I was in the emergency room with a kidney stone. That morning, as my spouse and I arrived home from the ER around 9:30am, my stepdaughter called to say she was taking her grandmother, my husband’s mom, to the ER. My mother-in-law went to the ER that day but never left the hospital. She died unexpectedly a few weeks later.
I tried to write about that time period multiple times. I have at least 3 drafts here on Substack. Finally, I was able to write something about it as part of an assignment for the memoir writing class I’m taking. I published it on my other Substack, which you can check out here:
I hope that eventually I can find the words to express how I have been feeling about my health crisis and my mother-in-law’s death. For now, that’s as good as I can do.
When my mother-in-law died, I already had a trip planned to Arizona to help care for a friend who was having back surgery. The timing could not have been worse. Three weeks after that loss, I left to stay in Arizona for two weeks. We planned my mother-in-law’s memorial service for the weekend after I arrived home. I was exhausted mentally, emotionally, and physically, and then four days after I arrived home from Arizona, I became sick with food poisoning. I love to travel, but the sudden-onset of serious illness that has accompanied my return home from my last two trips make me hesitant to leave home again.
I was sick for a solid 12 days. I am still having nausea on and off, but thankfully this week I am back at work and on a relatively normal routine again. At some point, as I lay on the couch in the fetal position, moaning and whining about how my stomach hurt, I realized that if I don’t stop putting off my personal and spiritual growth, it may never actually happen. Three months seem to have passed in the blink of an eye. 2025 is halfway over. If I wait until I’m feeling better; or until after a trip or specific event; or if I want to put things on hold until life seems less chaotic, I might blink and find that it is mid-2026. Worse yet, I may find several years have passed with me pushing the deadline for doing something healthier for myself over and over.
It’s not like any of it is huge. My goals are simple things like reading more; writing more regularly; meditating or doing reiki every day; simple, basic things that I know make me feel better. Certainly I have enough self-compassion to know that when I am barely eating and extremely nauseated, expecting myself to meditate or write is not realistic but neither is waiting until I’m feeling totally good. Who knows when I will feel totally good again? Today I’m just a little nauseated. I’m still grieving. I’m worried about the week that I had to take off from work. Owning my own business means if I don’t work, I don’t make any money. I tell clients all the time: “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second-best time is now.” That’s just a fancy way of saying, there is no better time than present to begin something. Tuesday, I started reading a book that has been on my bookshelf for a while, in the “to read” section. It’s a step in the right direction. I am trying not to get caught in all or nothing thinking. The cumulative benefit of many small things is just as great as if I implemented a new 45 minute morning routine of reading, meditating, and journaling, which is what my brain tells me I need to do in order to be successful!
2025 keeps beating the shit out of me but I’m very hopeful that it’s ready to move on to someone else now. Either way, I am not going to wait until I’m feeling totally well to do the things I want to do.