WHAT WE THINK WE’RE WAITING FOR
We are always reaching forward.
It’s almost instinctual, like a biological directive written somewhere deep in us, the same way a plant bends toward light it cannot yet touch, or how cells divide not because they are complete, but because they are compelled to become something more. We wake up inside this quiet, persistent belief that something is waiting for us just ahead. That happiness is not here, but there. Just one step further. Just one version better.
We build our lives around that promise. If I get the job, I’ll be happy. If I find the person, I’ll be whole. If I fix my body, my life will finally begin. But the horizon has a way of moving.
You reach it, and it dissolves. You become it, and it asks for more. Like gravity, like time, like entropy itself. There is always a forward pull. Even the universe is expanding, stretching endlessly outward, never arriving, never complete. And somewhere along the way, we decided that we had to reach for the “arrival” of some form of finality.
I think about something Steve Jobs once said: that you can’t connect the dots looking forward, only backward. And yet, we spend most of our lives trying to force those dots into a future that hasn’t happened yet, trying to design an ending before we’ve even learned how to be inside the middle.
We are always editing the present in favour of a hypothetical.
And don’t you find it exhausting?
Looking for a final form to arrive at but there is none. Not for us. Not for anything alive.
In biology, there is no such thing as a “finished” organism. Even at our most stable, our bodies are in constant negotiation with time: cells dying and regenerating, skin replacing itself, neurons rewiring, memories distorting and reforming. You are not the same person you were seven years ago, not even physically. Every version of you has already been shed, quietly, invisibly, like layers of skin dissolving into the past.
So what, then, are we trying to arrive at?
A version of ourselves that feels fixed and complete? A permanent happiness that we believe someone can give us consistently? Material things that will make us feel whole? A bank account with a number that is large enough to make us feel enough? A body so impeccably perfect that we feel invincible? A moment that will hold still long enough for us to finally rest?
These just don’t exist. Not all at the same time, if anything.
And I think, deep down, we know that. We’ve seen it happen—again and again.
You get the job, and the dream becomes a baseline. You fall in love, and love asks for evolution, for change, for endurance. You become the person you once longed to be, and still, there is a quiet voice asking, what’s next?
It reminds me of the way filmmakers talk about the “cut”—how every scene, no matter how beautiful, eventually has to end so the story can continue. Even in the most perfect moments, there is always an invisible editor, waiting. Nothing is meant to stay. Not even the things we begged for.
And yet, we live as if permanence is just one achievement away.
We should be tired of that illusion. We’re all exhausted. We’re tired of believing that our lives are something we have to chase down, corner and secure before we’re allowed to feel it.
Because what if there is no arrival?
What if there is only this—this exact, fleeting configuration of time and self and circumstance—never to be repeated again in quite the same way?
Ancient philosophers have spoken about this without calling it urgency. Many poets have written about this without trying to solve it. Even Robin Williams, standing on a desk in a classroom, reminded us that we are food for worms: that the world is borrowed, that time is brief, that we are here for a moment and then gone. Not as a warning, but as an invitation.
To notice. To live. To stop postponing. To let go of all material dependencies. To stop waiting for love to make us happy—and save us.
I think about being younger—thirteen, maybe—lying in bed with music playing through cheap earphones, staring at the ceiling like it held the blueprint of my future. There was fear, of course. There was always fear. But it was softer then. Less defined. Back then, life didn’t feel like something I had to solve. It felt like something I was allowed to step into.
Possibility wasn’t something I earned. It was something I inhabited.
And I wonder what changed for me. Or have I always been waiting to “arrive”?
When did I start believing that I had to become someone before I could feel alive? That I had to earn rest, earn love, earn stillness? That the present moment was just a waiting room for a better life that hadn’t started yet?
This year, I got things I once thought would change everything. I fell in love. I said the things I was afraid to say. I stepped into a version of myself that used to feel impossibly far away. I got to feel and hold it all in.
And still—there it was.
The wanting. The shifting. The longing. The quiet, familiar ache for something else. I wanted him to be in my life in the most perfect way. I wanted him back. I wanted the moment back. I wanted the version of the story that didn’t move forward. I just wanted time to stand still with him.
But stories do move forward. That’s the nature of them. That’s the nature of us.
Even stars collapse. Even oceans reshape their shores. Even the most stable systems, given enough time, change. So maybe the goal was never to hold anything still.
Maybe it’s to stand inside the movement of it all and say:
This, too.
This fleeting version of love. This unfinished version of me. This life that doesn’t look the way I thought it would. Because this is what I have. Not the perfected version. Not the future version. Not the one where everything finally aligns into something clean and complete.
Just this.
And maybe that’s not something to fix. Maybe that’s something to receive.
Like the way we breathe—automatic, unnoticed, essential. Like the way our hearts continue to beat whether you’ve figured your life out or not. There is something quietly miraculous about being here at all, about consciousness itself, about the fact that you are a collection of atoms that somehow learned how to feel.
Carl Sagan once said that we are made of star-stuff. That everything we are—every thought, every memory, every longing—comes from something ancient and cosmic and incomprehensibly vast. And yet, here we are, worrying about a text back, chasing validation, material things, an arbitrary number in our bank accounts, timelines, about milestones, about whether we’ve “arrived.”
But where are we arriving? And will we ever arrive?
Technically, scientifically, we are already an improbable outcome. To be alive.
So maybe this is the shift.
Not to stop wanting. Not to stop dreaming. Not to stop becoming. But to stop abandoning the present in the process. To stop treating this moment like it’s not enough just because it isn’t permanent and organized the way we want it to be. We must push ourselves to live extraordinarily, and to say:
I am here.
This is happening. This is what I get. And I will take it. All of it. The clarity and the confusion. The love and the loss. The version of me that is still figuring it out. Because I am alive.
And for a moment— however brief, however incomplete—that has to be enough.