“Ilang taon ka na? bakit wala ka pang______?”

I didn’t supply the last word but I know you did.

In an age where news, information and life updates are accessible with just one click, it’s easy to feel pressured to keep up, to live up to the norm and meet timelines to conform. Society has its own way of making anyone feel like an outcast and a misfit. You’re completely fine one minute, and then you feel like you’re missing out the next. But are you, really?

EXHIBIT A: You’re laughing with your friends and suddenly you realize you’re the only person on the table with no wedding ring. You don’t even have a boyfriend, or someone of similar nature. When they say they have to go home by 7 pm to tend the kids, you groan and try to convince them otherwise. You can’t, so by 6:45, you find yourself hugging them, hoping you’d meet next weekend, which you know won’t happen for the next seven months.

EXHIBIT B: You’re standing under a waiting shed by 7:48 in the morning looking for a ride. The sky is gloomy, the rain becoming heavier every second. For the eight time that hour, you swore under your breath. Twelve minutes left and you’re late to your 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. work. Until a car stopped in front of you and rolled down its window. You recognized the person behind the steering wheel as your college seatmate. Now an in-demand lawyer and a famous businessman, he offers you a ride and you let out a sigh of relief. However, you spent the next ten minutes listening to his success stories and you clutched the seat belt, feeling uncomfortable that you have nothing to share but the amount of paperwork waiting for you at 8 a.m.

EXHIBIT C: You’re sitting in a room. It’s the first day of class and you sat beside a lady in a puffy orange dress. She looked at you from head to foot and frowned. Suddenly she poked you and said you may be in the wrong room. “What class is this?,” you asked and she responded the same subject stated on your CoR. “No, I’m in the right room,” you said and smiled. It was then that you noticed the CoR on her desk. She was born in the year 2000. You covered your ID, though it didn’t state therein that you’re twice her age.

EXHIBIT D: You’re hanging out with your co-workers. After a quite hysterical but memorable day, they agreed to have a late-night party at the beach. Everyone, except you, said they’ll come. They asked you why and you said you cannot stay out past 11 p.m. as you don’t have a spare key at your parents’ house. They thought you were joking. “You’re 31. Who lives with their parents at 31?,” said one of your friends. You laughed along.

EXHIBIT E: You’re lying comfortably on the couch at 10 a.m. It has been three years since you graduated college when your parents displayed your diploma in the living room. You haven’t found a job yet for lack of experience. You scroll through social media and people you once knew post pictures of their recent travels outside the country. You sat up and viewed each picture. It’s the closest thing to experiencing Paris that you could do.

When is one early, anyway? When is one late?

If our lives are made with alarm clocks and hourglasses to be followed, then everyone would be moving at the same pace. Each person would pattern his or her life with that of another’s and honestly, where’s the spectacle in that? We’ll all be reflections of one another, like a part of one archetype. We have enough sci-fi movies and fiction books for that, I believe.

Reality, on the other hand, moves with a broken clock. Generally, we follow the same time pattern of 24 hours a day, only in different time zones. Like how the rotations of our planet influence these zones, our life also moves with influences. Be it people, decisions, or experiences, these cannot be controlled. Your influences will never be the same with someone else’s. That is what makes the clincher.

Also, our differences make us human. It makes us unique and determinate from every other soul we interact with. We become vulnerable, we even make mistakes, but none of those would make us miss out on something that’s meant to gravitate to us.

No one can take what’s meant to be yours in due time. The hands of your clock aren’t broken, you only think so because you’re checking the wrong one.

Hence, you’re never late nor early. You’re perfectly on time.