Trust Right Time
Miracles happen when we least expect, and things play out in right time for the right reasons. I call this type of “right time” by what it is—a noun. I’m convinced it exists if we let it. In things that feel “bad” are silver linings of “good,” and in that sense all things are perfect. We just can’t always tell something perfect is unfolding. And sometimes we forget to believe. I believe speed bumps in life are often the universe’s way of telling us we need to jump to a different track.
Years ago, we were supposed to see Gregory in Colorado in October only to find we could not get a hotel reservation. So Greg and I made a last-minute decision to go to Northern California to a town we loved and hadn’t been to in years. We told Gregory we’d visit in the new year. That weekend in October we stumbled onto an amazing property that seemed to have been waiting for us. I told Greg I’d wanted a writing cottage overlooking the water. There in Mendocino we found our amazing six- hundred-fifty-square-foot cottage on five acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was gorgeous. It was soon ours.
In February we visited Gregory only to find out he was unwell and needed to return home. He’d been home for Christmas break about three weeks earlier, and we’d gone to Colorado expecting a normal visit, so to arrive to him needing to come home was quite a shock. But we were in the right place at the right time because, had we seen him in October, he’d have not needed our help, and we’d have not found our cottage.
And when he went back to school six months later, after finally figuring out he was gluten intolerant, he was worried about finding an apartment. School was starting, student rentals were in tight supply, and he hadn’t been there to pounce in time. I told him it would be fine, that there was a perfect place waiting, and flew out with him a few days before school to help find it. We looked for places and set up appointments. The places were dumps.
It was late in the day, hot with the steam of summer, and he was discouraged. Out of the blue he decided to make a call about an apartment building his friend had lived in, which he knew was a good place and in demand. It was a long shot, but he followed his instinct and gave them a call. They picked up the phone and let him know an apartment had just become available. Voila! We drove right over and leased his miracle apartment, which turned out to be better than anything he’d have gotten with his friends.
Years earlier we remodeled our master bathroom and declared we’d wanted to redo our backyard at the end of the project. I promptly stripped the backyard of old kid toys and yard furniture; then it sat empty for what turned out to be three years. I hadn’t imagined we’d end up with a stark, empty yard, unlived in for that long a time. We kept trying to get landscapers to do work, and for weird and different reasons all of them fell through. I couldn’t figure out what was going on but decided to go with it. Then the Great Recession of 2008 hit.
I said to Greg I couldn’t live with one more summer of an unused yard and we needed to do something. In an effort to make progress, we had a bunch of plants torn out too, and there in the middle of an even cleaner, emptier palette, we realized the yard was screaming for a swimming pool. We had tried putting one in when we first moved in, but it was unaffordable. Long ago we had set that dream aside.
And then our pool epiphany came roaring back. We got quotes, and the investment was nearly half what they’d told us a decade earlier. In that moment, I realized the landscapers kept falling through because the universe was conspiring to get us that pool. We broke ground in 2009 and dove into it in the spring of 2010. People asked us why we put a pool in with our kids practically grown. The answer: because we wanted one. We simply didn’t know when it would happen and had lost sight of having asked.
Let the universe answer your dream even when you forget you have one.
For more information, see Magic in the Mundane: Making Life’s Ordinary Extraordinary.
Photo Credit: Jon Tyson
