Life’s Golden Tempo

Here we are a week later, and I still have not been able to stop thinking about this year’s Kentucky Derby.

The horse that started in last place ended up winning the race, and the horse’s name was Golden Tempo.

There is something almost poetic about that.

Not Golden Speed. Not Golden Rush. Golden Tempo.

The horse that began at the back of the pack found its moment at exactly the right time, and I think that is why the story stayed with me. It felt like such a reminder that life does not always unfold in the order we expect it to. Sometimes the people, opportunities, or dreams that seem furthest behind are simply moving at a different pace.

That idea stayed with me because there was a time in my own life when I probably seemed behind too.

When I graduated high school in 1986, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I did not apply to any colleges, and honestly, I did not give it much thought. It was a different time, and there was not the same pressure there is now for teenagers to have every detail of their future planned out.

Eventually, I did go to college, but I struggled. I was never a particularly strong student, and school did not come easily to me. There was no clear path and certainly no sign that I was headed toward anything remarkable.

But years later, something shifted when I went back for my master’s degree in teaching. For the first time in my life, I felt confident as a student. I became an honors student, which still surprises me when I think about it.

Not long after that, I moved to Hong Kong and taught at an international school for two years.

Even now, it feels hard to believe sometimes. I was the girl who did not want to go to sleepovers, the girl who never would have imagined going away to college, and yet there I was, living in a foreign country and building a life I never could have pictured for myself when I was younger.

Looking back now, I can see that none of it happened late. It happened in my own time.

That is what the idea of Golden Tempo means to me. It reminds me that there is a rhythm to life that cannot always be rushed. If my parents had forced me into a path I was not ready for, or if I had tried to follow someone else’s timeline, I do not know if I would have flourished in the same way.

As I look back on my life, I can see that the moments that shaped me most did not happen according to someone else’s timeline. They happened in their own time, which is why I have come to believe so deeply in divine timing.

To me, Golden Tempo feels like another way of saying the same thing. Not everyone begins in first place. Not everyone moves quickly. Some people need more time to grow into themselves, to find confidence, or to discover where they are meant to be.

But that does not mean they are behind.

Sometimes they are simply finding their own rhythm, and when the moment is right, everything begins to come together in ways that finally make sense.