I have been drowning in clichés lately.
Love. Career. Risk. Every corner I turn, another one. And the funny thing is, the older I get, the more I realize they became clichés because they kept being true.
The one that has been sitting with me most is this: running before you can walk.
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I couldn’t hear it when I was younger. I was impatient. Reckless. Young enough to feel invincible, which meant I also felt immune. I wanted to press fast forward on everything. The driver’s license, the travel, the money, the love — I wanted to know who I was going to become before I had any business knowing. I wanted to live in the future because the present felt like a waiting room I hadn’t earned the right to leave yet.
I rushed everything. And I told myself the whole time that I was ready.
I wasn’t.
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Here’s what I’ve learned since then.
Passion doesn’t explode into being. It builds. It compounds slowly, like a Jenga tower, piece by piece, until one day you look at it and realize it has height and weight and structure you couldn’t have planned. You just had to keep adding.
Someone once told me about the way a lion hunts. They don’t sprint from the start. They watch. They wait, hidden and still, reading everything. And when they move, when they finally go, they go with everything they have, at exactly the right moment.
All that stillness wasn’t weakness. It was preparation wearing patience as a disguise.
That image changed something in me.
Because when I finally understood what I was actually passionate about — truly, deeply understood it — the impatience dissolved on its own. I stopped wanting to skip ahead. I started loving the journey, not as a consolation prize for not being there yet, but because I realized the journey was the story. And I am someone who lives to write the story. Every single day.
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The time you spend becoming ready — that time is not lost. It is the most valuable thing you have, and you cannot get it back once it passes. So it matters what you do inside of it.
With love, if what you’re really looking for is the person who makes you better, the one who can carry your mountain on the days you need to put it down, you cannot force that. You cannot rush that into existence. Destiny assembles that kind of thing in its own time, and the only way to be there when it arrives is to be ready.
So listen to your heart. But listen carefully.
Impulse can sound exactly like your heart. It speaks in the same voice, at the same volume, with the same urgency. The difference is that your heart is steady underneath the noise, and impulse is the noise.
One guides you. The other just moves you.
Your heart is the compass. The only one that knows the path.
When you learn to hear it — really hear it — underneath all the rushing and the wanting and the fear, it will tell you exactly when to wait and exactly when to go.
Follow it.
It’s the only answer I’ve ever found that actually holds up.
Yep…