Lemons, Not Lightning

I do not think this is a novel thought. Someone has almost certainly had it before and said it better. I am writing it down because I had the realization tonight, and I want a reminder to notice things as they are happening rather than years afterward.

Here it is. We talk about the golden opportunity. The one shot. The buzzer beater that elevates you. Eminem built an entire song on it and it is a great song, but I do not think that is how life works. Life is not one opportunity. It is a long series of small ones that only add up to something in retrospect.

I got here in a roundabout way, which is the whole point.

I was reading a piece by Henrik Karlsson about how to find fascinating people. Halfway through I stopped and asked myself how I had arrived at it. I did not search for it. I had stumbled onto it inside a collection of writing curated by Molly Mielke. Why I clicked that particular piece I cannot tell you. I was not going in order. I was not picking the catchiest title. I had actually clicked a different Karlsson piece first, one about how he retrospectively followed a design path toward a fulfilling life, and I clicked it because I am at a crossroads and trying to work out what I should be doing to feel fulfilled rather than not.

My historical design has been to go with the flow rather than to be intentional. It has served me reasonably well and brought me very little fulfillment. That free-willed naivety is what delivered me to this particular dawn. Time to change some things.

Back to the thought. There is no single golden opportunity. The more aware you are, the more you notice that life is handing you lemons constantly, more often than you would guess.

Why did I end up on that blog? Why Molly's list? Why tonight? A string of subconscious pulls, triggered by a conscious decision to change the status quo. For most of this year I felt stagnant, sometimes actively regressing, and the whole thing was getting darker by the day.

Things happen to us every day and go unnoticed, because life moves fast and our minds are too restless to process anything while it unfolds.

For the first time in a long time I paused and thought deliberately about what led me to that essay. That is what led me to write this. And also for the first time in a long time, the words are coming without being forced.

I am not going to tell you to pause, breathe, and reflect, even though that is exactly what I did. What I will say is that the sooner you accept that life is made of small events, micro and nano ones, the sooner you end up on a trajectory that can actually change things. Not overnight transformation. Incremental change. The kind you barely register at the time and only see later, connecting the dots backward the way Jobs described.

Looking back, I count at least twenty of these smaller openings that could have become big moments. I did not have the awareness to notice. On plenty of them I looked straight at the moment and sighed and complained.

I do not regret letting them pass, for exactly the reason above. But I feel two things. First, I have no right to complain about never getting my moment, because any one of those might have been it. Second, I am grateful for the realization. Better late than never is a cliche and I now understand why cliches survive.

I do not mean this to be preachy. I am just optimistic about the future in a way I have not been in a while.

You cannot make lemonade with one lemon. Sit with that. Even something as simple as lemonade needs other ingredients.

So here is where I have landed. I am not trying to make lemonade from every lemon. When life hands me one I want to ask where the next ingredient is, the one that helps me build the whole recipe. Sometimes I will use too little sugar. Sometimes too much. Sometimes I will grab the salt. That is fine. I just need to be paying attention to what is being handed to me.

The funny part. I found this realization, and Henrik Karlsson, and Molly Mielke, because I was doing a LinkedIn search for a specific kind of product designer in the Bay Area for my company.