Expiration Dated: Of Lost Luggage and Missed Connections

Hate To Break It To You is a recurring feature wherein we dispense succinct home truths that everyone could benefit from facing up to, unpleasant as they may be.

Picking up where we left off…

In my previous post I mentioned the connection between “mistakes” and opportunities, namely that we shouldn’t fear making the former, but rather missing out on the latter. While we can change our minds and revise our decisions, we don’t get the same grace when it comes to opportunities. They’re fleeting and perishable. Supplies are limited, while quantities last, call now, operators are standing by. You know the drill. Yeah, there’s always a catch and this one is a bit of a bitch, kiddos.

Photo by markhillary

As I remember telling someone once upon a time*, opportunity doesn’t operate like the luggage carousel at the airport. It doesn’t just come around on a conveyor belt that’s content to keep looping until you’re ready to elbow your way in there and grab your bag. And if you live according to that model, you assume that you have plenty of time to sort things out and deal with distractions (where did I put my passport? should text my mother that I arrived safely?) before buckling down and finally turning your attention to the opportunity in question. When you finally do so, that’s when you find out that you’ve missed your shot and there’s nothing left there to grab. Whether your suitcase has been shuttled off to the unclaimed baggage desk (where lost opportunities go to die, if I really want to milk this analogy) or snatched up (wittingly or otherwise) by another traveler, you end up standing there empty handed.

Opportunity comes when it comes and it comes with the caveat that it’s more ephemeral than you would imagine. The timing might suck, the circumstances might be all wrong, you might have a dozen other plates in the air, but there’s opportunity, standing on your doorstep, cap in hand, FRAGILE stamped on its forehead and it’s only gonna knock once, ya dig?  And the perfect storm of readiness that you’re waiting for? It’s never going to come. There will never be a right time. Life is lived out of alignment. You can either accept that and modify your approach accordingly, or you can put your carpe diem off indefinitely and be left with nothing but whatever was stashed in your carry-on to show for it.

*This little analogy fell on deaf ears, but it was also given before I had a website devoted to prescriptivist encouragement for the masses, so I’m not holding that against myself.