It's about time.

Why we say this common phrase and how we can turn it around to make meaning out of our lives.

The phrase “it's about time” is such a fabulous statement. You must have heard it in several movies and TV shows. Most characters have this dialogue when they receive the much-awaited help from a pickle they are stuck in, or when they finally get the reinforcements they were looking for.

Source: Ant-Man (2015)

So here’s an unusual perspective on the same.

How a human perceives time, is very linear. When we look at our past, present, and future, we tend to make a lot of mistakes. We perceive it as one thing happening after another in, that sequence. Once we get the insight that we have been looking for, once we have that aha moment, we are quick to judge our past actions with our present insight. It seems to be the only viable perspective to look at our indigestible, gut-wrenching, troublesome past. Whenever a client in the therapy room discovers an insight hidden in plain sight, they are eager to try and fix the past with that missing piece of the puzzle. Their reaction to understanding and ‘solving’ their enigmatic issues at hand, is very commendable and warrants readiness to bring the growth in their life. But before they do that, they also need to just sit with their thoughts for some time. They have been waiting for this piece of information for a long time, and with that comes a lot of heavy feelings and complicated emotions.

When one has an insight, it acts as a surprising piece of information that solves a huge problem in their life. Remember Archimedes and the eureka moment when he discovered the impact of buoyant force. He was just going to take a bath in a tub when he stepped in, he observed little water flowing off the tub, and the next thing you know he was running in the streets, half-naked, shouting “Eureka”. A lot of us aren’t fortunate enough to go through a trial and error or have an insight randomly appear to us. We cannot afford to wait and let the problem disappear by itself. We have to learn and adapt because that’s the only option left for us.

In the present moment, insight makes sense. Realizing that changes will show up at your door shortly is essential. A lot of those changes will be with conscious intent, and other changes will be unintentional and out of control. Both of them are sure to follow up. So the present task becomes looking at your past with kindness and grace. Brave are those who don't judge their actions and behavior harshly, once the insight has been made known. At this very moment, wondering how it may have gone wrong is all a person can do. If the same problem repeats itself, the client has all the insight to not repeat the same tried-out solution. Now they know what to do differently. Now they know how to look at the problem from a different perspective.

Humans are incredible at predicting a few events, like the ability to predict the future, under a certain set of specific conditions. It may not impress some, but it’s an extraordinary feat. Some of us have a knack for knowing that a certain possibility will occur one hundred percent. We can’t pinpoint how we know, but we know. Explorers and voyagers sometimes just knew where to go and which direction to avoid. It depended a lot on their intuition. This insane human ability of intuition would warn them with an eerie, unexplained heavy feeling. This feeling just doesn’t feel right no matter how you evaluate a scenario. So the same explorers stopped themselves at the right time and the right place. And in other scenarios, they were certain about finding a piece of land, which could sustain their survival for the next thousand years. A possibility that will probably increase their life span. All because their intuition felt right this time, and with this direction. And when they finally realize the gold they found by chance, they go “It’s about time”.

Moral of this essay?

Let your intuition speak for you, let the insight appear from thin air. This is not a joke, but truly imagine a solution coming out of thin air, from a comical dialogue cloud. Maybe the dialogue box was there all along, but your focus was demanded by a hundred other things and you couldn’t use your child-like wonder to know what was hovering over your head. Or under your nose. It was never ‘about you’ cracking the solution, it was ‘about time’, that it appeared in front of you.