The Season Between: When Timing Won’t Be Told
There are seasons in clinical practice when grief itself seems to walk through the door— raw, unguarded, asking to be held. Lately, those stories have arrived more frequently: sudden loss, senseless accident, leaving behind a silence too wide for reason. There’s no explanation that can soothe it— no wisdom tidy enough to stay. “Everything happens for a reason” is a betrayal in the face of what’s unanswerable. Some things don’t happen for anything. They just happen.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to stay near what can’t be touched, what can’t be fixed. To sit beside what breaks without reaching for meaning or repair. To keep breathing in the company of mystery. It’s there— in the ache of what refuses to be explained— that I start to notice the same tension I feel in myself when life doesn’t align with the story I thought I was writing.
A door opens before we’ve learned the shape of the key, before our hands feel steady enough to hold what waits on the other side. Other times, we wait for years - knocking, praying, perfecting - only to find the threshold won’t yield. The timing feels cruel, almost personal. But timing, like the cycle of seasons, does not answer to our will. It moves by rhythm, not request.
In Chinese medicine, stagnation arises when movement meets resistance— when we grip too tightly or refuse to yield. The Liver, guardian of flow and vision, teaches us that movement depends on flexibility. To control is to constrict, to listen is to harmonize. When we try to force readiness— pushing for what we think should come, retreating from what has already arrived— we tighten the very current meant to carry us forward.
There is a season for sprouting, a season for fruiting, a season for fallow ground. Spring cannot rush winter; the seed does not bargain with soil. What looks like delay might be protection. What feels premature may, in truth, be the necessary discomfort of growth. Life’s rhythms don’t always match our imagined timelines, and the friction between them can ache like a knot just beneath the surface.
I am trying to change my relationship with the word readiness— to think of it less as a state I must arrive to, and more as a dialogue I am learning to hold gently. Life offers; I respond. Sometimes I answer yes with trembling. Sometimes I stay still, letting the offer pass through me like wind through tall grass. Both are movements. Both, in their way, keep something vital alive.
Perhaps what matters most is not when things arrive, but how I meet them— whether with fists or open palms. The body, like the seasons, teaches us that yielding is not weakness but wisdom. To unclench is to allow circulation; to allow circulation is to invite life back in.
Perhaps readiness is not something we find, but something that finds us— when our edges are softened enough, when our longing stops demanding and starts listening. Maybe there is no perfect timing, only our willingness to meet what comes. Some seasons call us forward; others ask us to stay. Readiness, I’m learning, is less a destination than a threshold— something that meets us in motion, somewhere between stillness and becoming.
