The Importance of Timing

Over the last few years I have become aware of the importance of timing.

This aspect of timing has to do with things I want to happen, now, this minute but that don't - no matter how much I fret and struggle and push and force - but, when the time is right and I'm ready to receive it, it generally all tends to come together.

Letting things come to me in their own good time was (and continues to be) a difficult lesson for me to learn, given the kind of person 'I like to think I used to be', namely a control freak. I now like to think of myself as a 'recovering control freak'. I don't always live up to it but it is, nevertheless, my aspiration.

But there's another aspect to timing that I'm only just becoming aware of. Most of my learning, insights and growing have come as a result of observing how I create my own life experience, including being at the receiving end of the very behaviour I used to inflict on others.

Relationships, I'm finding, are a treasure trove of learning opportunities. This is a particular case in point.

Something happened recently between a close friend and myself that caused me, for the first time, to feel angry and upset with her. I called her and left her a voicemail message saying so.

Silence.

I followed this up with an email message trying to open the door to talking things over, getting over it and moving on.

Silence.

Then, about a week later I received a 'holding' email along the lines that she had been away and that she would reply to me 'in the next few days'. The message ended with 'lots of love.'

I didn't feel her 'love'. To me it felt like one of those habitual ways of ending a message. It didn't mean anything.

That was when I first realised the importance of timing in the context of close relationships.

That email told me that this friend needed to be in control and that she would deal with me in her own good time - her mind and her unspoken, perhaps even unacknowledged fears, firmly in control.

But I'm just coming to realise that, when it comes to close relationships, the mind is a poor guide. Sometimes a response from the heart, however poorly thought through or clumsily expressed, is just what's needed.

The problem with trying to control feelings - one's own or somebody else's - is that this is simply a delusion. Feelings cannot be controlled; they can only be set aside, distorted, suppressed, pretend they're not there or projected onto someone else. Whatever the mechanism, it is hugely damaging. A face-saving strategy is extremely risky to the love and genuine closeness of a relationship, whatever its nature.

Open-heartedness is the opposite of a carefully planned approach and the cost of missing the opportunity to express it is high.

I'm aware that people will do anything to avoid embarrassment, discomfort and loss of face. Sadly, the cost in terms of damaged relationships is very high. A useful question I found in one of Neal Donald Walsch's books was 'What would love do now?'. A less spiritual but equally powerful comment came from Alan, my life coach, who said 'you're not going to die of 'uncomfortable'.

Authenticity and closeness in relationships can only exist when we transcend embarrassment, discomfort and habit and respond from the heart.

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