I feel like I’ve been waiting all my life for summer to come. And now it’s the end of June and I haven’t caught a firefly yet.
I haven’t walked through the golf course at the end of my street admidst the stretchy evening shadows and curious squirrels. I haven’t felt mud ooze between my toes in a warm rain puddle.
What am I waiting for? Summer will be over in the blink of an eye and I will have missed it. I’ll be waiting another lifetime.

How much of our life is this fleeting summer bliss. We wait for the perfect moment to notice things. We wait for the perfect circumstances to reach out to people. We wait for the the sun to peek out from behind a whipped cream cloud at a perfect 72 degrees to venture outside. We wait. And then we blink.

And it’s gone again.

I have a magnet inside my medicine cabinet that simply says “What are you waiting for?” It’s been there for years and my senses have dulled to its message. But at this point in my life, I know the answer and it is the fuel behind almost every negative emotion: Fear.

Fear is the sneaky culprit that worms its way in between life’s unseen cracks. It infests our lives and invades our courage. It steels our youth and clouds our vision slowly, quietly. Then one day, we’re sitting in our comfiest chair, wearing our comfiest pants and we are struck sick by the vast quantities of time that seem to have vanished. Time that was like a treasure chest of rubies and diamonds that we carelessly threw to the bottom of the ocean while we waited and wished (for rubies and diamonds).

That’s right, we wasted our time wishing for the very things we had the capacity and time and ability to do. Wishing we had written that screenplay or taken those piano lessons or taken in the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower. That we would have attempted to be the parent we were convinced we were wholly unqualified to be. That we had had the courage to reach out to the love of our lives before he drifted too far away.

What exactly are we so afraid of that we are willing to let life pass us by? Is it the standard rejection excuse? Or that we might soil the reputation that exists solely in our own minds? Of what might be required of us should we succeed? Of what people might think of us, or worse, what cruel words they might say to us if we make ourselves vulnerable enough to try something they are too busy cowering in a corner to try?

Whatever way fear has manifested itself in your life, it’s time to give that animal a name and send him off to live at your old uncle Willy’s farm.

No, we can’t the reclaim the past. So, my advice is to have one final cry and then let the ruins of your past lie – a powerful monument to your present-day wisdom. Wisdom encompassing the gifts of today, of now. Because, if you are reading this, you are already rich with something that a whole lot of people do not have.

Time.

You have now. Today.

So what are you waiting for?