You Will Never Be Ready
And that's okay
One of the most common phrases I see in Instagram carousels, marketing emails, podcasts, books, and just about every call to action imaginable begins the same way:
If you’re ready to...
-change your life
-start your business
-leave (your career, your marriage, your city, your country)
-become the person you’re meant to be
It’s such a common phrase that we rarely stop to question the assumption hidden inside it.
Here’s the truth.
You will never be ready.
I have never been ready. Neither have you. Neither has anyone else.
Readiness is one of those stories we’ve agreed to believe, as though somewhere “out there” exists a mythological creature with soft ears wearing flowy robes and big silver jewelry who came up with and sold us all this magical moment when uncertainty disappears, fear evaporates, and life finally announces, “Okay... now you’re ready.”
I’ve never met that moment.
I wasn’t ready for college or to become a rafting guide on the Kenai River in Alaska.
I wasn’t ready for marriage. Or divorce.
I wasn’t ready to become a mother.
I wasn’t ready to spend the final five years of my mother’s life as her full-time caregiver.
I wasn’t ready to watch both of my parents die.
I wasn’t ready to write and publish books or launch a podcast.
I wasn’t ready for any of the milestone birthdays that somehow kept arriving anyway.
Looking back, none of those experiences waited for me to feel prepared. They simply arrived, and life asked me to become the person who could meet them.
Sometimes I showed up with the energy and strength to go the distance the moment asked of me and win the blue ribbon.
Sometimes I barely managed to drag my ragged self inch by inch through the dirt and muck, surrounded by barbed wire outside a fortress with guards pointing guns at me.
It’s tempting to imagine that everyone else feels more prepared than we do.
The athlete running onto the field.
The actor stepping onto the stage.
The musician walking into the spotlight.
The teacher standing before a classroom for the first time.
The surgeon making the first incision.
The parent bringing home a newborn.
Do you think the young men who stormed the beaches of Normandy were ready?
Even though someone almost certainly shouted, “Ready? Go!”
No.
They went anyway.
Looking back, almost everyone tells some version of the same story.
“I wasn’t ready.”
“I just did it anyway.”
That’s the paradox.
Readiness isn’t what comes before action.
Action is what slowly creates the feeling we later mistake for readiness.
Life doesn’t wait for us to catch up.
You won’t be ready for your heart to break.
And let me let you in on a little secret.
It will.
If it hasn’t yet, give it time. There isn’t a person who lives long enough without loving deeply enough whose heart remains untouched. And for the record, a broken heart isn’t evidence that life has gone wrong. It’s evidence that you’ve participated in being alive.
My favorite living poet, David Whyte, has written beautifully about the gifts hidden inside a broken heart. Having recently experienced one myself, I can attest that heartbreak has a way of revealing parts of ourselves we couldn’t have found any other way.
You won’t be ready for that revelation either.
You won’t be ready when someone you love dies.
You won’t be ready to explain divorce to your children.
You won’t be ready to face your addictions.
You won’t be ready to admit you’ve wandered so far from yourself that you barely recognize the person in the mirror.
You won’t be ready to discover that nature always wins.
And yet life keeps asking for the next step.
Perhaps that’s why the promise of readiness has become so seductive.
We live in a culture that continually whispers that just one more article, one more video, one more course, one more certification, one more productivity system, one more year of preparation will finally make us ready.
So we wait.
We scroll.
We consume.
We prepare to prepare.
Meanwhile, life is happening without us.
Right now we’re living through forces so enormous and largely invisible that entire generations are learning to wait instead of act. I’ve spoken with parents who describe watching (and feeling helpless to stop) their tweens spend ten, twelve, sometimes sixteen hours a day in front of a screen during summer vacation. The childhood those parents remember and the childhood unfolding before them feel like two entirely different worlds.
The current is strong, stronger than many of us realize.
Scrolling and screens can become more than distractions.
They can become waiting rooms, places where we postpone living while we unconsciously wait to feel ready enough to begin.
I don’t want that life.
Every morning when I wake up, the first thing I think is how grateful I am that I woke up today.
Then I think about what lies ahead.
I have a vision, a plan, a list.
I also have absolutely no idea what today will bring.
Am I ready?
No.
I’ve never been. I probably never will be.
But readiness has never been the price of admission to a meaningful life.
Life has always asked something much simpler of me.
Take the next step.
Then the next.
And the next.