It’s Too Soon Too Tell
Authored By Jake Engel
I’ve changed my mind about some of the best and worst things that have ever happened to me.
Things I once considered disasters eventually became turning points, while things I was certain I wanted became things I was grateful to leave behind. People I barely noticed became important to me. People I thought would be around forever became people I used to know. Decisions that once kept me awake at night are now difficult to remember making.
What I find funny is how confident I was about all of it at the time.
We’re remarkably quick to decide what something means while it’s still happening. Something doesn’t work out? We call it a failure. We don’t know what comes next, then decide we’re lost. Someone else gets somewhere faster and suddenly we’re behind.
I’m particularly bad about wanting the clarity of hindsight without waiting for the hindsight. I want to know whether I made the right decision while I’m still making it, whether something was worth it before I know what came from it, and whether this strange little stretch of life is leading somewhere I’ll eventually be glad I went.
Unfortunately, the future has been extremely stingy with spoilers.
I found a line in the notes app on my phone from January 14, 2021 recently. I’m not sure where it’s from or who said it, but it was worth jotting down at the time: It’s too soon to tell.
I think I like it because it leaves room for life to surprise me without insisting the surprise has to be good.
We seem to have an enormous appetite for turning whatever happened most recently into evidence about how our entire lives are going. One bad week becomes "I’m unhappy." One rejection becomes "I’m not good enough." A few months without obvious progress becomes "I’m falling behind." We take a tiny sample size from a life that will hopefully contain thousands more days and start drawing conclusions from it.
Sometimes those conclusions will be right. Sometimes something really does suck, and no amount of perspective will eventually reveal it to have been a beautiful gift from the universe. “It’s too soon to tell” doesn’t ask me to pretend something good is coming. It just reminds me that I don’t have to decide what everything means immediately. Because I've been wrong before.
I've worried about things that worked themselves out, mourned things I eventually stopped wanting, and been disappointed by things that later mattered very little. I've also underestimated people and moments that became far more important than I could've known at the time.
And maybe that’s the lesson: not everything needs an explanation while I’m still in the middle of it. Sometimes I just need to give life enough time to prove me wrong again.
