Life is all about opportunities. It’s about chances and about not always knowing what will happen. Life happens, love happens and work happens and often, the best things happen in the most inopportune times. Grabbing the bull by the horns and ceasing the moment is the one thing that will make us stronger, help us learn and allows us to really learn from mistakes, as well as figure out what we truly want and need.

A huge copout I hear from people is “I am not ready.” Interestingly enough, when I look back on my life, I can honestly say that this is one of the few statements I’ve never made. Ready? Ready for what?

The thing is that each and everyone of us has issues, baggage, problems, flaws, things we battle and pasts we are dealing with. Every person has made mistakes, maybe some rather big ones, and maybe some smaller ones. No one is perfect; and that’s OK! Personally, I always felt that the strange idiosyncrasies and flaws people have often made them more beautiful, likable and lovable. The point is that, the older we get, the more we actually may shoulder in terms of how we feel and what we are battling. I’d like to believe that I am one of the people who consistently and steadily works on her stuff – sometimes more successfully than other times, but at least I am not giving up. However, I have yet to find the point where I can say “Yep! I am ready.” That thought honestly never comes to my mind. What ever life throws at me, I tend to be more in the “yay” mode than think “oh dear, what will I do now, because I am not ready.

I have come to believe that saying I’m not ready is a really bad excuse for saying I am too afraid to act. Maybe I didn’t want to act, or do what would bring me to the next level. Maybe I am lazy, maybe I am a procrastinator and maybe I don’t have the tools and don’t know how, so instead of acquiring them, I am just going to distract myself from the issue at hand and when life strikes, I’ll retreat into my shell and whine that I wasn’t ready.

I have found one thing to be true. I am never truly ready for the big stuff. But… I am willing to give it a shot. I am willing to acquire the tools I may still lack and I am willing to jump right in and make a decision. There is a cliff over there? Oh yay! Let me run right up and jump off of it!
To my surprise I generally found that I was perfectly able and in that sense ready to deal with whatever came my way. While I may have suffered set backs and heartbreak, I never really shied away from giving it my best and going for it. There is something truly empowering of being in the moment like that, even if it may lead to failure!

In my twenties I had an excellent therapist, Dr. Fulmer, who once told me that everything I do in life depends on only one thing – making a decision! The confusion, the fear, the stress and anxiety all stem from the simple inability or unwillingness to decide. Because when we decide, provided we are people with integrity, we actually have to DO something. We can no longer hide behind excuses and cliches like “I’m not ready.” When we say “yes” we have to do whatever it takes to support that decision and when we say “no” we also have to do what it takes to support that decision; and we forfeit the right to complain about a bad thing, if we are not willing to make the decision to leave it!

I believe that sometimes, based on the state of mind I am in, things might be challenging, difficult and seem impossible. But I’d also like to think that I am always ready. Not being ready is like hitting the lottery and keep on waiting for another ticket to win; meanwhile holding the first winning one in hand, unable to do anything with it.

With all of that, I’d like to now share this TED talk on vulnerability. I guess this demonstrates yet again that maybe, we didn’t think we were ready, but some of us are at least willing to still do, instead of claiming we’ve tried (which is the equivalent to really not doing anything).