I don’t know when exactly it was when I realised that the moment had passed and we missed our timing. I wonder, was it when the morning sun woke me up from my night slumber, or it happened when I was watching heavy rainfall disturb the stillness of the lake in front of me. I remember thinking to myself, ah, it’s how it goes, it’s how you know the story won’t ever have a chance to write itself. 

Timing… Everything was, will be and still is about it. It is genuinely magnificent how we tend to ignore its importance. 

 Back in 2019, when I was waiting for a cup of coffee in a small coffee house in a tiny Japanese town.  It was a lovely coffee house, full of little mementoes from across the world. Various coins and banknotes from different countries were laying around and there was a display of dozen fully stamped passports with visas of every corner of the world I could think of. They seemed to belong to the owner of the coffee house, the person standing behind the counter. 

I was intently watching how carefully the owner was brewing the cup of coffee I ordered. Everything he did seemed so precise and somehow mesmerising.

 As if he caught my glance, the brewer looked at me, and at the moment our eyes met, I couldn’t help, but ask “How do you even know when the coffee is ready? Does it make a difference if you miss the precise moment you should take the kettle from the stove? “ 

He chuckled ” I did this so many times already that by now I just know without giving it much thought. And it does make a  difference too if you do it too soon, or if you are a moment too late, you would simply spoil the coffee.”

 I asked, ” Does it truly matter that much? Can one truly taste the difference? “

He laughed again and said, “It is better for me to show you for you to make your own judgment on this matter.” 

He gave me a cup of coffee he just brewed and went on to do two other brews. The one cup where he rushed the process, and another, where it seemed he forgot that he was brewing a coffee. He mixed the cups, and I was surprised that I knew straight away which was a cup brewed with care and which ones were not. I don’t know why at the moment I said to him, “I never knew timing mattered so much.” 

He responded, “Don’t you think it’s the same with life? If you step into something when it’s too soon, it will spoil it to the point you won’t want to finish it, and if you do it too late, it will be too bitter, and you won’t be able to enjoy it. Everything is always about timing. “ 

I was curious at that point “So what we should do if we miss the timing, what we should do with an imperfect cup of coffee? “

He smiled ” I personally use it on plants; it is good fertiliser. Yet, you should acknowledge the fact that you tried; it learning curve after all. With practice, you will know without needing to taste the coffee when it is ready to be served.” 

His words did not seem neither too profound nor too significant.   At that moment, I had no clue how much his words will resonate with me in the future. So I simply choose to push away that strange feeling, that something of significance was passed to me.  I decided to think what transpired was only a  passing conversation filled with unusual warmth between two people that crossed each other timelines for a brief moment.

At that time, I thought that there was no wrong or the right time for anything; if we as humans were genuinely moved by something or somebody, we wouldn’t miss a chance. No matter what, we would make it right; we would make it work. 

However, nowadays, I feel what that mindset of mine forgot to consider factors that were not dependant on me. That we as people are all running on separate timelines, and if you miss the window of opportunity when they run parallel to each other, we miss a chance to merge two timelines together. There is nothing we can do to make it right.

It’s almost like boarding a train, sometimes we arrive too early to the station and board an earlier train and not the one we were meant to take, and sometimes we are late to the station. We are forced to take a later one. Sometimes we are on time, we are on the platform, and we hesitate for a tiny moment. Perhaps, we turned away for a moment to get the strawberry milk from a wending machine, and our train passed by. Perhaps, we dozed off. Whatever the reason, it does not change the outcome that we missed an opportunity to board it. 

The thing is, nothing truly changed; we can always catch the other train to the same destination.  Yet somehow, it is always bittersweet, the fact that we either rushed or were too late. After all, we know, the destination might be the same. Yet, the passenger and journey won’t be, our arrival time will change too, and we will never know what awaited on board the train we missed. 

At the end of the day, there is no point to regret it,  as we can’t outrun time or change things that already happened. We missed our timing. It is as simple as that, and there is nothing we can do about it. We will get it right one day, yet it will be to a different destination, to a story that we haven’t yet encountered. 

All that said, I still wonder how many changes I missed to board other trains and how many missed a chance to board mine? Well, there is no much point in wondering; I can only try to be on time more often. As the coffee shop owner said, it’s the learning curve. 

Thus, acknowledge timings. Acknowledge that other’s trains won’t wait for you to decide if you want to board them.  You can’t rush it neither, you also cannot wait too long, and the hardest thing is learning to find that midpoint. 

All I can say,  if you on the platform and hesitating to board – board it now, don’t wait any longer. If it is the train, you need it or long. There will be no other changes; it will eventually move, it has to move as time waits for no one. 

There is nothing worst when standing on the platform and choosing not to board the train due to hesitation. There is nothing worst when you finally decided to step inside, the doors of the train close before your nose and you are left all by yourself. And you can do it watch it slowly disappear from your sight. Fully knowing, you will forever ask yourself, ‘if I would have taken a step minute sooner, what would have awaited me on board?’