We can Transcend Time, But We Won’t Be Able to Master Timing

Knowing this will vastly improve our ability to love ourselves

My favourite Japanese actor Takahashi Issey started acting at the age of 10. With his experience, talent and good looks, he was sidelined on most productions, but suddenly shot to fame at the age of 36. He is now the most popular actor in Japan, the “Ideal Boyfriend” across all age groups (that’s crazy Japanese polling culture for you).

The same stories happened to Benedict Cumberbatch, who suddenly acquired a global following of Cumberbitches after cast as modern Sherlock Holmes at around 34 years old. Before that, he was in various things, mostly theatre productions confined to the London audience. (If you must know, I am also a Cumberbitch).

When Issey was asked how does he feel about the sudden success, he couldn’t formulate a logical explanation, but timing.

As I made a dramatic career change and even physical moved to another place in the middle of the pandemic at the age of 31, I know I have transcended time. Precisely, I have no fear of “I am too old and too comfortable to make changes”, I also have no regards for the usual expectation that “women like me should’ve settled, get married and have babies by now”.

But what is timing? Can we transcend it? What should we do about it if the timing is not on our side? Although I said in the title that we can’t master timing, that’s actually untrue (!), and I suggest you read on. It’s only for the people who are patient.

The “divine timing”

For most things, the effort and the outcome usually correspond with each other, i.e. if we work hard enough in a job, we will be valued.

Even if we aren’t very good at it, work is likely to eventually promote us eventually for our loyalty, hard work and experience, although we might not shoot up as quickly as our peers.

However, the mystery of timing controls situation that is beyond the corresponding effort. For example, we can work hard on a relationship but that other person has to be toxic and struggling with their own life at that given time, and unfortunately, the true love had to end.

Or, as digital creators, we do everything by the books (from local SEO to consistent posting), and still can’t beat the odd person who somehow earns 4-figures for their first post.

Or, simply, why is our mum is hurting us and herself with her childhood trauma?

We can’t control the timing

Malcolm Gladwell has investigated what made successful people successful in his book Outlier. It’s obvious that timing plays a big role in people’s success — from Joe Flom to Bill Gates, I strongly recommend people to read this book.

For people who believe in absolute fairness and social mobility, this is sad. How can our background, ethnicity, gender, intelligence and timing, anything outside our hard work, dictate our paths?

With social movements and improvements in social mobilities for certain societies, many of the above obstacles have been slowly removed. The only thing that can’t be improved or changed, is timing.

Even when Japan’s now “ideal boyfriend” Takahashi was placed in the perfect environment to become a big star — including joining the Tokyo children theatre and then in a high school specifically for nurturing pop stars, both have only created networks and job opportunities, but the timing for him to become a big hit was still much later than his counterparts.

A similar question can be asked: why did certain books only become a big hit after the authors’ were dead? Or why we only discovered someone’s criminal acts after they were dead, so they could never be punished?

We can’t control timing, so what can we do about it?

We can choose how to respond to it

The last thing we should do is lament about it. The reason some people called it ‘divine timing’ is because it’s backed by wisdom, not human logic.

• Leave the timing to the divine: given there’s nothing we can do about it, rather than holding on to the “why”, we should just let it go. Seriously, why meddle with Gods/Universe/Buddha/Nature, let it affect our moods and feelings, when we can better use our time? To be clear, this means, we don’t even need to be patient about “our time will come”, we just need to disregard this concept completely, right now.
• Accept the world is unfair: Ask the planet and other animals, human, being the least strong species in the food chain, is controlling the entire planet and every living and dead organism’s future. The world is not fair at all, stop being idealistic about it. P.S. if you want to read further about this, I suggest you start by differentiating the concept of utopia and heterotopias.
• これままで大丈夫です: A Japanese idiom loosely translates as “It is fine for what it is”. If the timing is not with us, our life can only still be fine when we are doing something that we enjoy doing in each present moment.
• Passionate process: Only through not being backed by good timing, will we realise what it meant to focus on the process over outcome. Until we learn the truth of this, it’s most likely that the timing won’t be with us.

It is based on the last point, that I believe we can master the concept of timing after all, despite what I said in the title. Read on!

Bonus: how to master timing

If you have read until now, I think the divine (or anything beyond human means) has something to tell you in this particular timing of your life.

If the above makes sense to you, and you are ready to remove from getting obsessed with timing (in particular, the woo-woos who keep talking about divine timing). Then you are ready to be in the present moment, shaping your life doing what you are truly passionate to do.

The divine wants you to shift the attention from goals to process, from future to now.

Once you have disregarded the need to succeed, or the need for the timing to be aligned to yours, then you might eventually notice that alignment/timing has secretly arrived.

Only by giving up, will you gain. Only by doing what you love doing, will the timing comes. This concept applies to most things actually and is stated over and over again in old philosophical and sacred texts (P.S. it doesn’t contradict with visualisation and manifestation, which is a topic for another day).

P.S. Bill Gates didn’t spend much time talking about timing and IQ, he was coding, coding a lot.

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