The Universe Is Not in a Hurry
Forests take centuries. Rivers carve canyons over millions of years. Somehow we expect our own lives to transform by Thursday.
Go outside on a clear night and look up for a while. Some of the light reaching your eyes left its star long before anyone you have ever known was born. You are seeing the past, still travelling. It has been on its way for a very long time, and it is in no rush at all.
Nature has a different relationship with time than we do. An oak does not try to become an oak by the end of the quarter. A river does not strain to reach the sea. Everything in the natural world moves at the pace of what it is. Growth happens, enormous growth, but it unfolds rather than being forced.
We, on the other hand, are often in a terrible hurry. To heal, to succeed, to finally become the person we think we should be. We treat our inner life like a project with a deadline, and then feel like failures when the deadline passes.
Whatever you call the larger intelligence that moves through all of this, nature, the creator, the universe, life itself, it seems to work patiently. Seasons turn. Wounds close. Seeds sit in dark soil for a long time before anything shows above ground. Nothing is wasted in that darkness. It is simply the part we cannot see.
There is real relief in remembering that you are part of this same unfolding. You are not a machine that needs fixing on a schedule. You are a living thing, growing at the speed living things grow.
Tonight, if you can, step outside and look up for five minutes. No agenda. Just let yourself be small under something very large and very old. Then come back inside a little less in a hurry.
