Too Often, the Opportunity Knocks-Daily Meditation 4.14.23

Today’s quotation:

Too often, the opportunity knocks, but by the time you push back the chain, push back the bolt, unhook the two locks, and shut off the burglar alarm, it’s too late.-Rita Coolidge

Today’s Meditation:

What kinds of opportunities have you missed this week?  Why have you missed them?  Sometimes opportunities present themselves to us, but we can’t take advantage of them because our current situations keep us from jumping when they do come–if we even recognize them.

Our decisions in life, of course, often preclude opportunities.  Once we decide to get married and have a family, for example, we’re pretty much locked into a course that doesn’t allow us to take an opportunity to spend a year backpacking with friends in Europe.  Once I commit myself to a semester- or year-long teaching contract, I cannot take an opportunity to do another job elsewhere.  This is a simple fact of life.

But sometimes, we get locked into the status quo because we desire safety so much that we hesitate whenever the opportunity presents itself, and we can’t take advantage of it.  We keep our doors bolted shut because we fear disruption, we fear that our habits and routines will be lost, and we’ve come not just to love them but to depend on them to provide us with what we see as security.  When we get locked into routines this way, we often lose our ability to see and recognize opportunities when they come our way.

Opportunities come in many forms:  jobs, relationships, hobbies, learning, creating, repairing, and even buying and/or selling.  But we have to keep our eyes open for them so that they don’t pass us by when they arrive so that we don’t miss the “windows” of opportunity that open pretty often but that close themselves eventually if we don’t respond to them.

Questions to consider:

What kinds of opportunities have you had in the past that you haven’t taken advantage of?

Why are so many of us blind to opportunities that present themselves to us?

How can “hurrying and rushing” keep us from taking advantage of opportunities in our lives?

For further thought:

Doors of opportunity constantly surround us.  That’s the way life is.  Often, opportunities do not come in packages wrapped in the colors we expected.  When an unexpected surprise happens, we refuse to see it, and so we miss the opportunity.  Sometimes we are so focused on a goal far out in the future that we do not see what is right in front of us, or we get so busy hurrying and rushing around that we lose all perspective.-Anne Wilson Schaef

If you missed yesterday’s Daily Meditation, it is right here.