on transitions & ripeness: some things take time

learning when to wait, when to move, and how to trust the timing

Credit: Julia Topal

I've noticed my life operates in rough decade cycles. Something big and influential happens every decade that catalyzes a series of meaningful life events over that following decade.

At 11, I started spending summers in my family's villages in India to get to know my grandmothers better. I continued those yearly visits until my early twenties. Those summers led me to start Aahana (a nonprofit) during my first year of college which would later influence my decision to move to India and to document my family's history.

At 21, I decided to move to India for three months, which turned into three years. That same year, just before graduation, my paternal grandmother passed away. A few months later, as I was preparing for my extended stay in India, my maternal grandmother, who I was closest to, also died. The timing felt like their way of shepherding me into whatever was meant to unfold in the years following. It felt funny, after years of spending month sprints there at a time, that my maternal grandmother wouldn’t be there for the time I decided to live there.

At 31, I moved to the Bay Area. Another unexpected transition, but one that's let me harvest lessons from the past decade while returning to insights I'd developed just after moving to India. At this time, I started to come back to parts of my early 20’s self that I had decided to abandon or put on the back burner throughout my 20’s.

The Compounding Returns of Early (Contrarian) Choices

When I moved to India a decade ago, I was exposed to the OG of alternative movements- alternative education, alternative currencies, alternative towns and city planning, and alternative health. Many of these movements that felt fringe then are slowly, just over a decade later, starting to become more widely adopted. Dare I say, they’re slowly becoming the norm or at least enter the mainstream.

Over those years in India, I made it a personal mission to explore alternative schools - Krishnamurti's schools, schools in Auroville, Montessori schools, Schumacher College, the Small School in Devon, England. I met my heroes like Satish Kumar. I didn't write about it, I didn't talk about it to anyone. I just did it because I didn't even know how to explain what I was doing to anyone in my life.

I was 22 years old, had decided to turn down a job at JP Morgan (a path that my mom reminded me about for years), and until then only had one other person in my life who I felt could have understood what I was doing (shout out Nate Nichols). While on the outside I was traveling, I was actually on a calculated journey, exploring these alternatives that would play a role in what I'd build over the next decade and now what I'd like to spend the next decade building.

But I was also learning something I couldn't articulate then: the difference between forcing something and trusting its timing. I was disappointing family expectations, taking salary risks, not saving as much as I could have been. I often didn't have conversations with my parents about these choices. Sometimes I just went and did things because I didn't know how to explain them. When I was living in India, someone about a decade older told me "it's important to take your parents on your journey with you." I still think about that advice often, and have since tried as best I could to bring them along, even when I can’t fully articulate where I’m going.

In 2016, I started working for a crypto company before realizing that the little money I did have from earning that Mumbai hourly wage doing marketing for them could have been put towards buying bitcoin. That same year, I dove deep into holistic medicine, specifically Ayurvedic medicine. I did my first panchakarma and started getting into cycle syncing and seed cycling. Over the next eighteen months, I naturally balanced most of my hormones. At the time, I thought about studying Ayurveda, but it wasn’t the time, but eventually years later, I enrolled in a 3-year Ayurvedic Practitioner program that I’m almost done with.

In 2021 when everyone in New York started talking about DAOs, I found it fascinating how people were creating elaborate blockchain systems and raising millions for organizational principles I'd experienced working beautifully in simple grassroots communities in India - decentralized decision-making, collective ownership, transparent governance.

From 2015 to 2018, I wove in and out of these alternative communities, intentional communities, spiritual communities - most of which were hippie-ish as well. But I knew one day they could be (and would need to be) part of the mainstream conversation. I was also driven by knowing that this is where the future of my work lay. I didn't know how it would manifest, but I sensed it would kickstart whatever came next.

WHY ISN'T IT TIME YET?! - The Tension Between Forcing and Waiting

In India, I picked up, yet again, this book I say I've been writing for a very long time. I call it the Book of Generations: a cultural ethnographic memoir that follows three generations of my Gujarati family's transformation from pre-industrial village life to American suburban success. It serves as both an intimate family story and a rigorous anthropological study of my family's past thousand years of history—how we adapted through massive systemic transitions, and how we lived economically, socially, religiously, spiritually.

A few years later, after coming back from India, I enrolled in grad school to study storytelling and anthropology because I knew I'd never work on that body of work as much as I would in those years. I decided to write it seriously, and I did. For two years during grad school, I woke up every morning with the sole focus of getting three hours of writing and research in. Each night, I primed myself to wake up to do the best writing and research possible.

I had the discipline. I had the material. I had the time. This was the thing I would always say that if I died tomorrow, I'd regret not putting into the world. So, when May 2020 came around and I was finishing my grad school program, I was confused by the nagging resistance to publishing this mammoth project I'd poured myself into in the years prior.

Around that time, I received a little bit of grant funding to work on SHE Health (it was then called The Thinkers) through NYU. The pull towards the business was practical - financial stability after years of grad school. But my loyalty to the book stayed fierce. I resisted abandoning this thing I'd worked on so intensely. I felt a responsibility to put this story out that I'd been nurturing for years.

Yet something deeper was telling me the book wasn't ready, even though all the external pieces were in place. There was a feeling of forcing from the inside, a pushing against something. It was different from normal pre-publication nerves. Usually when I was working on the book, even when I didn't feel like showing up to write, there was still a momentum carrying me forward. This felt like the opposite, like I was pushing against the current instead of flowing with it.

I was 26 at the time, and though I couldn't articulate it then, I needed the next five years of life lessons - my relationship with my parents evolving, my relationship with myself, questions of identity and culture, love. I needed to live through the very themes I explored in that book and have my own version of systemic transition, not just research it.

This was my first real lesson in the delicate balance between will and timing. I could write, schedule, research, but I couldn't force the perspective I needed for it to feel ripe. The book needed me to understand entrepreneurship, failure, resilience, love, loss just as I had documented them in my family's story.

That next chapter of founding was challenging, but now in retrospect, makes sense why I needed to go on that path: I discovered my own weaknesses around focus, seeing things through, learning what it actually means to work smarter rather than just working hard, self-regulation as an entrepreneur, and a practicality around entrepreneurship that seemed to be lacking. I knew I needed to focus on one area, and it wasn't the time for the book. I had to trust that internal resistance, even when it made no logical sense.

This decision to put down the book and start SHE taught me something crucial about starting a business that I couldn't have learned any other way. As Alex Hormozi talks about, there's this "depths of despair" moment when you know so much as an entrepreneur that it gets incredibly difficult, and that's often when founders give up. But that's actually when you need to keep going because you have all that knowledge (the good and bad) and you need to now move forward with it. I had to learn how to trust my inner authority over advisors and people outside of myself, and recognize the right times to trust external guidance - a skill that, at the time, felt completely divorced from how I approached my work.

In retrospect, that was my time to learn those lessons - the messy, lived experience of building something from nothing. The book was waiting for me to become worthy of writing it, even if it meant going against the wishes of my younger version of myself who thought she'd publish something great by 30.

The Harvest: When Things Finally Align

I've been thinking a lot about the timing of things. These explorations I've carried for years but never fully pulled the trigger on, that I'm now considering for this next chapter. They all had their time. I had to move to the Bay Area first and then meet my partner (where I'd suspected, through yet another whisper, that both would happen around the same time). I had to learn how to build a company, experience my own version of failures and mistakes, navigate difficult relationships, and learn how to self-regulate as both an entrepreneur and a human being.

Looking back at the past decade-plus, I can see the patterns that have guided me since I was 21, all driven by following my inner voice. A few that have been consistent over the past decade have been:

Early contrarian choices compound over time. Those three years after college, when I chose exploration over a JP Morgan office, are still paying dividends. The people I met then, the frameworks I developed, the perspectives I gained - they've shaped everything since and continue creating unexpected opportunities. I spoke to people across multiple generations and gathered insights that still influence how I think about everything. Yes, I believe you can start at any time, but I also believe there are dividends to following whispers early. I've learned that they do keep showing up, sometimes louder, so you don't have to worry about them going away.

Intuition manifests as recurring visions. The "whispers" I followed were recurring thoughts and visuals that wouldn't go away, usually manifesting as specific visions: me in a particular place, working with someone specific, meeting certain people. They're not always fully accurate, but there are usually pieces that align. They've consistently been nudges in directions that feel right.

Body clues about alignment and timing. I've learned to recognize physical sensations that indicate misalignment: hollowness when there's no path forward in a job, specific textures of feeling around people or places, lack of depth in experiences. If it feels out of alignment, it usually is. But that doesn't mean you need to leave immediately - there may be a lesson to see through before you transition away.

Will vs flow in the pool of life. The middle of the metaphorical pool of life is where I’ve learned the difference between will and force. Sometimes we thrash (forcing), sink (giving up), half float, half sink, etc. But floating in the middle - staying present without rushing to grab edges - that's where I’ve learned to develop the sensitivity to feel for the right current.

Understanding Ripeness

Now, six months into the Bay Area, the projects I once put aside are calling me back, but from a place of integration rather than urgency. I’m in a process I’ve never really allowed myself to fall into - exploration. My current Notion doc has 10 different business ideas, experimentations, explorations.

I'm learning to recognize ripeness. There's a quality of readiness that comes from wanting something and having developed the capacity to receive it. The book needed me to build a company, to understand systems and transitions, to develop the perspective that only comes from living through your own family's transformation in real time.

I don't think we're fully at the mercy of random timing. We're not passive recipients waiting for the universe to decide. The magic happens when inner readiness meets outer opportunity - and we have agency in creating both. We can develop our capacity, do the inner work, and position ourselves externally. But we can't force the moment when everything clicks together. That's the dance: preparing ourselves while trusting the timing.

The Meta Lesson

This post took months to write because the perspective wasn't ready yet. I had the material, but not the integration. I kept starting and stopping, wondering if the idea was worth pursuing at all. Now, six months into the Bay Area, floating in my own middle-of-the-pool moment, the words finally have somewhere to land. Learning the difference between "not yet" and "not ever" has been monumental.

There's this delicate dance between willing things into existence and trusting their timing. I can get clear, visualize, prepare, show up, but I can't force the ripeness.

The words still took work - effort, revision, will, but it carried a different texture, a readiness I couldn’t manufacture.

Most of the time, the most strategic thing I’ve done is to stop trying to make it the right time and let time catch up to the readiness I’ve already built.