The Call Doesn't Ask If You're Ready
On the essence of becoming
The phone rang on the 4th of July.
It was the local rodeo. They needed someone to sing the National Anthem. Their scheduled performer had backed out. The event was two hours away.
The liminal space doesn’t wait for your preparation
to catch up with your potential.
Maybe you have your own version of this moment.
Not a rodeo. Not a National Anthem. But the call that arrived before you felt qualified to receive it. The opportunity that didn’t check your credentials before it knocked. The question that wanted an answer before your certainty had time to catch up with your character.
Most of us have been there. Measuring the gap between what we know and what we’d need to know, feeling it widen with every second we spend calculating it.
My son didn’t measure it…he just said yes.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand about that kind of yes.
The liminal space doesn’t wait for your preparation to catch up with your potential. It arrives as a phone call on a holiday afternoon with a two hour window and demands an answer.
This isn’t about blind enthusiasm. There will always be some skill needed to carry you through. My son has some community theater experience. He knows what a stage feels like. He knows how to hold a microphone. He knows how to project his voice to an audience. What he didn’t have was vocal training. What he didn’t know was the National Anthem well enough to perform it in front of a crowd.
The underdeveloped skill was real. It just wasn’t the point.
The point is what the French call je ne sais quoi. That particular quality that belongs only to you and resists every attempt at a precise definition. Not skill exactly. Not confidence exactly. Something more like character. The part of you that shows up when the optimized path would have sent someone more prepared.
His performance was respectful. Not perfect. Not devastating. He started and ended in the same key.
But that’s not the part I’m still thinking about.
What I’m still thinking about is the yes that arrived before the question finished. The thirteen year old who understood, without being able to articulate it, that the space between who he was and who he is becoming requires something more than preparation.
It requires showing up.
You might be standing at the edge of your own two hour window right now. The opportunity that arrives before you feel ready. The call you’re still deciding whether to return. The certainty probably isn’t coming first. It comes after the yes, in the doing, on the other side of the gap you decided to cross anyway.
I wonder how many calls rang and went to voicemail because the answer wasn’t ready yet. I wonder what was waiting on the other end of those calls.
If these ideas resonate, they run deeper in my debut novel. THE ALGO is set in a time just a few decisions from our own. It explores what happens when the hidden systems we’ve been examining here become the governing logic of an entire society. IndieReader called it “a wake-up call to humanity, impossible to put down.”
It’s available now.
Stay curious.
CJ Arlow