When You're Ready

“It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now”

-Hugh Laurie

You will never be more ready than you are right now because wherever you are is the place where you decide to start. Being ready does not happen by some strange magic. Being ready for anything requires time and preparation and intention, but begins at the moment where you decide to do whatever it is you're doing. If you want to go on a backpacking trip, you slowly start researching gear and trails and weather and then begin training. If you don't train, thats okay, you'll dive right into the deep end. You were still the most ready that you could ever be at that point in time and so you began. Every time you try, you learn and become more ready.

The word 'ready' itself isn't a finite place. There aren't neon signs announcing that you've made it. Being ready involves being fully present in the evolution of reaching a goal, and then learning as you go. The physical self is relatively easy to prepare for and the pain and excitement of growing into our physical bodies is comprehensible through the ways we move, eat, sleep and care for our human machines. However, the emotional and spiritual realms also require this intention, care and training. 

There is no point at which someone will be totally 'ready' for love, for acceptance, for trust, for God, for..... the list goes on. Each person can be ready to begin the path towards all of these things. Granted, some people can unconsciously work towards this readiness without fully being aware they are doing it. We prepare ourselves for love through the time and attention we give to our passion and purpose. When we dedicate ourselves to something bigger than ourselves that we align with, we fulfill ourselves from the inside. This fulfillment can happen subconsciously as we generate more joy and pride in the work we do in the world. 

The irony is that you may never feel ready. Readiness comes from accepting yourself, the work you have done and the work you will do, fully, and then trusting yourself to go. Emotionally, there is work in sorting through our experiences and how we learn from them. When we recognize that our experiences have happened to us and that we are not attached to them, we can learn from them as we would learn from stories. Our fears and anger are indicators of the potential for pain and must be honored as such. With intimacy and vulnerability, fear will usually be present. She is a built in defense mechanism to support us into our best selves. Readiness in love begins when you decide to put fear in the backseat and to trust that every moment of vulnerability and intimacy is a choice. By stepping into this power, you begin to prepare yourself for an extraordinary love. 

There is no point that will say you are ready for love. There is a point where you will decide to begin creating a love within yourself that you would like to attract. This is when you are ready. When you are ready to offer your full self into the world, aware and compassionate for your strengths and weaknesses equally, you will find love. There will be people who understand and people who do not. It takes time to learn to accept that the people who are meant to love you will simply love you. They will be open to receiving your love as it is because they accept theirs to the same extent as you. Deep, beautiful love is possible when you believe in it. 

Whatever form of love you believe in is out there. Chances are that you will not get it right the first time. There is time though. When you embody exactly the kind of love that you are, there is no room for question. When the love you are becomes a way of being with no expectation, you invite in an equal love. Sometimes you will find this love and the timing will not be right. The training that needs to be done will reveal itself and it is up to you whether to honor it or not. If we do not try, we cannot learn. But when we try. When we put our whole selves into whatever it is we want to do, we slowly become more of ourselves.

Love is gentle. There is no fight. There is only a choice to appear exactly as you are trusting other people to understand. Through communication and healing and endless compassion for ourselves, we prepare ourselves for it. We cannot be more ready than we are right now, we only have to choose to try.