The Second Best Time Is Now

First published on April 15, 2019

'I wish,' I thought to myself, sitting at the desk in office job, my day job, midway through a career change and with a mind full of tangled string, 'That I'd been keeping LinkedIn up to date this whole time.' It felt excruciating to have add people from ten years ago, who I had met twice, as I desperately tried to understand and update my network in case it might help with whatever came next.

In the end, gradually, I added them. The ones I felt least embarrassed about first, then the next least embarrassing, up until some people who had almost certainly forgotten me. I didn't die. No one told me to get lost. Some people ignored me. No one laughed at or mocked me. 

It was only when my friend Nicole and I ran a workshop on mastering your personal brandthat I realised how devious that wishing is. That wishing for more time, for yesterday, when you could have started. That wish that you had started when you were young, when there was more time ahead of you, when you wouldn't be so far behind. It holds you. It makes you think it's not worth it to start. It makes you never add those people. At least, if you're lucky, what it does is make you never add those people. If you're lucky, it's only a few LinkedIn contacts you miss out on. 

If you're unlucky, it's years of not taking the leap and pursuing your calling. 

It's years of never asking out that person, the one who makes your stomach tingle and your mouth get tangled.

It's years you could have been teaching, not in this company you fell into.

It's years you could have stayed in a relationship, if you had just started listening to her, instead of giving it up as lost. 

It's years of not writing, or not painting. 

It's years you haven't been playing football or tennis. 

It's years you haven't learned to play the piano, years without guitars, years without singing lessons, years without dance.

It's years without sitting, listening to yourself, and noticing that you aren't happy. But you could be, if you choose to. 

It's years without taking responsibility for yourself, for your family, for the children you left behind. 

It's years without finding out how to love others and love yourself. 

It's years without giving up smoking, without getting into shape. 

It's years without saying, 'I'm not afraid of you any more.'

It's years of putting up, or settling, without inspiration and possibility.

It's years without saying, 'Enough. I've had enough.' 

I only know two Chinese proverbs. One of them is this:

The best time to plant an apple tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. 

The thing about wishing, that insidious wishing, is that the weight of it only grows as each day, week, month or year passes. Every year you wait, it gets bigger. 

The best time was whenever you wish you'd started. The second best time is now.