Blooming in Your Own Time

Life often feels like a series of prescribed phases: entering adulthood, building a career, raising a family, retiring. It can seem as if we’re expected to move through them in lockstep. Everyone around us appears to be doing the same thing, whether getting a job, getting promoted, starting a family. But there is no single arc of development that fits us all. We each march to the beat of our own drum. Maybe you don’t feel ready to settle down until your fifties. Maybe you launch a new career at seventy. Maybe you dive into work as a teenager, only to discover college calling in your forties.

Consider this:

My father was a journalist who wrote a weekly political column for nearly forty-five years. Each week he would retreat to his home office—a converted walk-in closet in his bedroom—and work on the column. It was always an effort for him, not something he particularly enjoyed, and he was rarely satisfied with the result. Just before he died, at eighty-five, as he finished yet another column, he turned to me with a chuckle and said, “You know, I think I’m just starting to get the hang of this. I guess I’m a late bloomer.”

He’s not alone. History is full of late bloomers: Mary Wesley, the British novelist, didn’t publish her first adult novel until she was seventy-one. By the time she died at ninety, she had written ten bestsellers. Grandma Moses began painting in her seventies after arthritis ended her embroidery. Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first Little House book at sixty-five. Frank McCourt won the Pulitzer Prize at sixty-six for Angela’s Ashes.

Putting it into Play 

These stories remind us that the rhythms of life aren’t linear or standardized but unfold in their own seasons. Blooming isn’t late or early, but individual. Each of us unfolds in our own time. Not chronological time, but kairotic time, Kairos is the Greek word for “the fullness of time.” The power we exercise is the power to follow our own unfolding, and to resist the scripts handed to us by age, or by any social construct.