Can we miss our life’s purpose?

Or can we trust divine timing, no matter how long it takes?

From Hilma Af Klimt’s exhibition, Paintings for the Future at the Guggenheim. It took almost 80 years after Hilma Af Klimts’s death to exhibit her work in the spiral temple that she channeled in her visions.

Throughout my life I have often wondered, how important is timing to our lives? Can I miss out on an idea or an opportunity if I don’t seize on it right away? And if so is that the only one, or will there be others?

This fear of missing out doesn’t exactly wake me up in the middle of the night, but I notice it like the hum of a machine in the background of my thoughts. Much like the boiler room in Stephen King’s The Shining, this anxiety is rife with psychological tension and can build up to an explosive climax if not tended to properly, or channeled into too much work and not enough play — because we all know what that leads to.

I have written before about where ideas might come from, and am inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s musings on them in her book Big Magic. In addition to the mystery of where and how they originate, there is the question of how long do we have to act on them. Like Gilbert in her book, we have all had the experience of either working hard for months on something only to see someone else has done it with a bigger budget or a year’s head start. On a…