The trouble with "one day" is that eventually it arrives.

Usually when we're still in the middle of sorting something else out.

For months, sometimes years, something can sit quite happily in the future. You know it's there. You've made the decision. You might even be preparing for it. But it still feels comfortably distant, tucked away in that category of life labelled "later".

Then something shifts.

A date appears in the diary. A practical detail needs sorting. A conversation suddenly becomes relevant. And before you've quite caught up with yourself, the thing you've been imagining has started taking up space in real life.

I had one of those moments this week.

I was looking at the calendar, trying to work out what needed doing over the next few months, and realised that something I've been planning in the background has quietly crossed a line. It has stopped feeling like an idea and started feeling real.

And it caught me because I realised how much easier it is to imagine a future than it is to stand at the edge of one.

When something is still a possibility, it can be whatever we want it to be. We can think about it, prepare for it, picture ourselves doing it and quietly assume that, by the time it arrives, we'll somehow feel ready.

Life has a habit of exposing that assumption.

Looking back, I can't think of many things that came with certainty attached.

I wasn't ready to walk away from a 28-year career in journalism, and if I'm honest I wasn't ready to open a yoga studio either. I certainly wasn't ready when it came time to close one, and FireWoven hasn't exactly arrived with an instruction manual.

Yet somehow life kept moving.

Certainty never seemed particularly interested in turning up first.

That thought has been sitting with me this week because we've just begun Dream inside FireWoven, and our first enquiry is Vikalpa: the stories we live inside. Not dramatic stories necessarily, just the ordinary ones that sound so reasonable we stop questioning them.

"I'll do that when things calm down."

"I need a bit more time."

"I'll know when I'm ready."

Some of them are true, at least for a while. Some have served us well. Many were formed intelligently. But every now and then it's worth asking whether we're dealing with reality or simply a story we've repeated often enough that it now sounds like a fact.

I'm not entirely sure where I land with all of this yet. It feels more like something I'm noticing than something I've figured out.

What I keep coming back to is how many things in my life began before I felt ready for them. None of them arrived with a neat little certificate confirming I was now sufficiently prepared.

Looking back, certainty seems to have been remarkably absent from most of the meaningful bits.

Life, on the other hand, kept turning up.

Anyway.

That's where my mind has been wandering this week.

J x

Join Me In FireWoven​

P.S. Pay attention to the things you tell yourself are simply "the way things are". They might be. Then again, they might not.