I’ve just been spit out by the magical Disney World machine, having bled (money) and been beaten down (by toy-hungry kids).
But there was an unexpected joy: watching my son brave his first big roller coaster.
As he hesitated in front of the ride, my aunt told him, “When you’re ready, you’ll know.” My seven-year-old agonized. “But I just don’t know!”
FOMO is my Achilles’ heel and this week I saw it in my kid—the fear of missing out on a new experience, the frustration of indecision. But my son did know. He knew, deep down, that he wasn’t ready even if he couldn’t quite articulate it. So we carried on with our day, opting for tamer rides instead.
It wasn’t until we sat down at the bird show in Magic Kingdom that he suddenly turned to me and said, “I want to go on the Everest roller coaster now.”
“But what about the bird show?” I asked.
“I want to do Everest now,” he said, his face all business.
He was ready. He and his dad were back in less than fifteen minutes, both beaming with pride.
I kept thinking about my aunt’s simple line: “When you’re ready, you’ll know.” It’s true for all of us, yet we still agonize over big decisions. Sometimes, we just need to let our options marinate in our minds as we go about our day, trusting that we’ll just know when the time is right.
When we torture ourselves over making the “right” decision, we may actually be stifling the process that helps understand what we really want. But when we remember to trust ourselves, the answers we are looking for tend to bubble up naturally when we’re ready. In moments like this, a little bit of patience can ultimately save us so much time, stress, and mental space.
