The Ripe Time or the Right Time - How Do You Live?

How many times in your life have you tried to accomplish some goal and not have it work out despite feeling like you had all of the right ingredients for success? You rack your brain trying to make sense out of what is going wrong and come away feeling like, since you're the common denominator, maybe the problem is you.

Well, what if I told you that the problem might not be you after all? But rather it is one of the most consequential ingredients in any recipe, whether it is cooking a meal or trying to ignite a social movement--timing.

In this post, I will unpack how to know when timing is working with us and when we are working against time. And I will help you see how, by understanding the nature of what it is you're trying to accomplish, you can make timing work for you.

For everything there is a season...

If I go outside right now, I can go to my garden box and grab a handful of tomatoes more delicious than any I can get from my local grocery store chain. What did we do to make these tomatoes so delicious? Well, besides planting the seeds and giving them water, we didn't do much except wait and pick them at the ripe time. Fundamentally, 90+% of the work was handled by nature itself.

Now, how would your life be different if everything you did worked as naturally as growing these tomatoes? Would you be happier? Would you be healthier? More loving? More understanding? More at peace?

Well, I am here to tell you that everything in our lives is meant to grow as naturally as the tomatoes in my garden box. And this is true whether you are looking for the right career, trying to grow vegetables, or help build a society that works better for more people. Unfortunately, many of us have never been told this wisdom of what I am calling "knowing the ripe time." Instead, we have been told to forsake the ripe time and conform to the unnatural notion of the so called "right time", which for most institutions is when they want it and on their terms--even if that timing and those terms are incompatible with nature's flow.

In this post, I will explain the distinctions in the simplest way possible. Then, I will give you a few tips on how to reattune yourself to be able to discern one from the other. And lastly, I will offer you an invitation to help you navigate the shifts that come with your reattunement to the natural rhythms of life.

What is the Ripe Time?

Nature give me several signs that I'm picking my tomatoes at the ripe time. The deep color and the size are the most obvious. But the main signal that it is the ripe time to pick the tomato is how easily the vine releases its fruit. If I have to do anything more than the lightest of twists, then I am picking the tomato too soon. And while I will not be harmed by eating a tomato that was released to soon, everything that the tomato has to give me will be less than its optimal version if I can't wait until the fullness of time. Everything in the natural world works this way. Indeed everything has a ripe time.

My wife understood this natural wisdom when she got pregnant at 40 years old. Throughout her pregnancy, the doctors kept telling us that she was high risk and they called her pregnancy geriatric. At just around 8 months, they started trying to schedule an inducement. When my wife said that she felt it was too soon, they would communicate to her in a way that made her feel like she was making a mistake. They were certain that they knew the "right time" for our baby to be born.

At 9 months, when she hadn't gone into labor, they added the pressure. My wife's response was that she knew her body and it was not ready to give birth yet. Admittedly, I was starting to get nervous too, but I trusted her with her body and waited. It was all I could do. Then, at just at 9 and a half months, while going out to dinner, our daughter's ripe time had come. And not too long after arriving at the hospital, my wife gave birth to our little 6.5 lbs baby. To give some perspective, her older sister was 8.5 lbs. To this day, whenever we look back at pictures of my wife's pregnancy, she says, "Imagine how tiny she would have been if we listened to the doctors and induced a month before she was ready." Ripe time vs right time.

What is the right time?

If I started outlining everything in our society that is sub-optimal because of the tyranny of the illusory "right time", it would overwhelm most folks. So let me just go back to the gardening analogy. The reason why my tomatoes from my garden are so much better than those at the grocery store is because there is a high likelihood that the tomatoes at the grocery store are several weeks old. Is that shocking? Well here's another shocker. Tomatoes along with several other types of produce like apples and avocados are classified as climacteric. This means that they continue to ripen even after being picked. As a result mass food producers pick them at the right time to maximize profit, which can translate to sitting in a storage facility for weeks or even months before getting to the grocery store. Right time vs ripe time. (Visit here to learn more.)

Of course, this post isn't about changing the grocery system. That is a personal choice. But, what I do want to communicate is that because the trajectory of growth for everything in nature is meant to lead to the ripe time, that means we humans are meant to grow that way as well. However, because the systems we have created are designed to push products into the marketplace as soon as possible according to the "right time" to maximize profits, many of us have become unwitting extensions of these systems and have lost our intrinsic connection to our sense of the ripe times for us to move through our lives at our personal highest levels of engagement.

Learn to Wait

I am in a season right now where I am working on getting back to being very discerning about the ripe time to say and do things. In fact, I have been working on this very post for months. I could have completed it long ago. But, it just didn't feel like the RIPE time. So, I waited. And this notion of ripe time vs. right time, is something I have honored for as long as I can remember.

I can't explain to you why. But for much of my life, I had the discipline to wait for the ripe time no matter what was going on around me. Peer pressure, threats, and even my own fear was not enough to make me want to forsake that wisdom. And as a result, I have often had to say goodbye to people, places, and things that could not respect this discipline I maintained. That is until I became a daddy.

There was something about becoming a parent that, tempted me to ignore that wisdom. And more times than I would like, I listened to that temptation. I imagine not growing up with my dad and waiting so long to become one myself brought up a little anxiety for me. Suddenly, I was concerned about the "right time" of doing things. The main contributing factor was that I became more aware of my age. Because I wanted to spend as much time as possible with my two daughters, I started counting backwards instead of looking forward. But life only flows in one direction. And it is not in reverse.

The Wait of the World

In order to return to the presence of mind that I enjoyed for almost 32 years, when I allowed myself to live at the pace of my own internal awareness of Nature's Calling, if you will, I have been getting pretty consistent at taking the time to get still. Some people will call this meditation. I just call it stopping. And I've come to realize that so few of us have this skill that I'm actually in the process of creating an online course on it.

After talking to dozens of people about why they can't stop, I have come to realize that most of their psyches unconsciously connect stopping to dying. This is no joke. They feel like if they stop they will die. At first I thought I might be missing the mark with that idea. But when I stopped and sat with that idea, I was able to relate and connect to why becoming a parent started making me dumber. LOL.

My grandfather, who I lived with after my parents divorced, died when he was just 56, my dad died when he was just 64 and my mother started succumbing to dementia when she was just 66 or so. They stopped. And it was connected to death or one of it's corollaries. In my grandad and dad's case, everything stopped. And in my mom's case she stopped being able to learn and remember. Which for me feels like a death accelerant. So, I can see why so many of us fear stopping. And, I have to admit that with every passing moment, I am mindful that I have fewer grains in the hourglass. Still, I know that this is not cause to rush that which is not yet fully formed in me. Presence of mind is always the clearer way. It is what I need to be mindful of if I am to perceive the ripe time.

If you can't stop, which is essentially waiting, you will never be able to perceive the ripe time. And in fact, if you take not being able to wait to a further extreme, you may not even be able to get the sub-optimal benefits of the right time. Consider again the tomatoes. What if a couple days after I planted the seeds, I took that I could see what was happening underneath the soil as a sign that the tomatoes weren't growing? So, in my rush, I decided to dig up the seeds just to check thereby killing the plant before it even started sprouting. Then I would end up with nothing. Now take that analogy forward to other areas in your life.

Where in your life has your inability to wait/stop done you a disservice?

• Business
• Family
• Communities
• Romantic Relationships
• Accomplishing goals

Of course, I am not suggesting that developing your capacity to wait for the ripe time is some sort of panacea that will make everything in your life work out perfectly. There are always other factors that can create new challenges even when you've done everything that you could do including waiting for the fullness of time. For example, a couple of years ago, we had an early storm followed by a freeze that wiped out hundreds of tomatoes. I couldn't do anything about that. But even when things don't turn out as I hoped or expected in my garden or in life, cultivating the capacity to stop, wait, and start over again is a gift that keeps on giving. (How to start again is another element that I will be teaching in my course.)

As Buckminster Fuller told my mentor Marshall Thurber, "You are not in charge of the Universe." Or as this piece of Indian wisdom teaches, "You can make choices at the full capacity of your finite intelligence. But, Infinite Intelligence is in charge of the outcome." And lastly, consider this awareness from an ancient Hebraic tradition, "We can plant the seeds and give them water. But God gives the increase." At a minimum, I hope that what has been shared here is showing up for you at the RIPE TIME. We live in a society that not encourage stopping and waiting. This means that learning to do this is a form of resistance training. There will be those close to you who may put up the most resistance. But in service to yourself and others, I encourage you to intentionally develop this ability. For a last bit of encourage, consider that not having the capacity to wait can lead to several detriments, such as:

1. Impatience and Frustration: Without the capacity to wait, individuals may experience heightened frustration when things don't happen immediately, leading to stress and anxiety.
2. Poor Decision-Making: A lack of waiting can result in rushed decisions, often without considering all factors, which can lead to negative outcomes that can emerge when you least expect it.
3. Missed Opportunities: The inability to wait can cause individuals to overlook or abandon potentially beneficial opportunities that require time to develop.
4. Strained Relationships: In relationships, the inability to wait can create tension and misunderstandings, as it may signal a lack of consideration for others' needs and timing.
5. Reduced Growth and Learning: Personal growth often requires time and reflection. Without the ability to wait, individuals might miss out on important lessons and experiences that come with time and patience.

My life commitment is to work with tens of thousands of people to help them live into their ripe timing to create communities where increasingly more of us can flourish. And it begins with you. If you gained from this post, consider signing up for this newsletter. If you are already signed up, consider sharing this post with at least one person who you think will benefit from it. It is a fact that when we share knowledge, we actually retain it better simply because the thought that someone else we know has the same information gives us a sense of accountability to living up to the information we share. Lastly, if you would like to learn more about how to stop and start again, please feel free to reach out to me through Linkedin and let's set up a time to connect.