04/06/2026
There's a version of this story where I wasn't ready.
Spirit decided that was irrelevant.
About four years ago, my life took itself apart in the space of eight weeks. Not as a metaphor. As a literal sequence of events that, looking back, had a kind of ruthless precision to it.
First, a car accident. Just me and a road sign. No one else involved. I came out unharmed but I knew, sitting there on the side of the road, that my nervous system had been running on empty for longer than I'd been honest about. The car was written off - or so I was told. I pushed back, found another way, got it back. I didn't know yet that was just the opening act.
Weeks later, I lost work that no longer matched where I was going. The day before moving into a new home with twice the rent of my previous place. I stood in that moment and thought - this timing is either catastrophic or it's deliberate.
It was deliberate.
Six weeks after that, my dad passed.
I'm not sharing this for sympathy. I'm sharing it because of the thing I can see now that I couldn't see then.
The Eagle doesn't ask the eaglet if it's ready before pushing it from the nest. It just pushes. Because it already knows what the eaglet doesn't - the falling is how the flying starts. There's no other way to learn it. You can't be told. You have to go over the edge.
I'd been telling myself for months I'd leave that work in July. Six more months, then I'll be ready, then the conditions will be right, then it'll feel safer to go.
Spirit didn't wait for July.
And I keep seeing this same pattern in the people I work with. Staying somewhere they've outgrown. Negotiating with themselves about when they'll finally move. Waiting for the internal permission slip that never quite arrives. And then life withdraws the choice from them anyway. The redundancy lands. The situation tips past bearable. The thing they were gripping releases them first.
The pattern doesn't wait for your readiness.
It waits for you to finally see it.
Have you ever been pushed out of something before you felt ready - and understood why, only later?