A bank locker has always made sense to me as a way of thinking about how things actually work in life — not because it’s a perfect analogy, but because it captures something that most frameworks quietly skip over.
You have one key. The bank has the other. And no matter how prepared you are, no matter how many times you’ve rehearsed the combination in your head, nothing opens unless both keys turn at the same time.
There are two ways this goes wrong, and both are quietly maddening in their own way. The first is when you show up fully ready — key in hand, everything in order — and find the bank closed, the manager out, or the system down. You’ve done everything right. It just doesn’t matter today. The second is when the bank calls you in, everything on their side is ready to go, and you get there and realise you left your key at home. Same result. Nothing moves. And in both cases, the thing that failed you wasn’t effort — it was alignment. The two sides simply weren’t in the same place at the same time.
If you let the metaphor stretch a little, one of those keys is everything you carry — the work you’ve put in, the thinking you’ve sharpened, the preparation that nobody sees. The other key belongs to everything outside you — timing, context, the right person reading the right thing on the right day, a market that’s finally ready, a conversation that happens to go somewhere. You can’t hold that key. You can’t really earn it. You can only keep yours in good shape and hope that at some point, both show up together.
That part is easy enough to accept. What’s harder is the question that comes after it.
Because if you’ve been doing the work, genuinely doing it, and the door still hasn’t opened — what are you supposed to make of that? Do you stay on the same path, keep building, trust that the timing will eventually catch up to you? Or do you take the fact that nothing has opened as information — as a sign that maybe this particular door isn’t yours, and it’s time to try somewhere else? There’s no clean answer, and anyone who offers you one quickly is probably not being fully honest with you. If you stay, you might just be early. Or you might be loyal to something that was never going to work. If you move, you might be making a smart adjustment. Or you might be leaving the moment before things would have finally shifted. You won’t know. That’s not a solvable problem — it’s just the actual texture of being in the middle of something.
People will have opinions, of course. Some will tell you patience is everything. Others will tell you that if it were meant to happen, it already would have. Both can sound convincing, depending on the day and your mood and who’s saying it. But neither of them actually turns the lock.
The thing that has made this easier to sit with — not easier to solve, just easier to carry — is a small shift in how you think about what your key actually is. For a long time, it’s tempting to think of the idea as your key. The specific thing you’re building, the particular version of the thing you’re trying to make work. But ideas are fragile vessels for timing. The same idea can be exactly wrong in one moment and exactly right in another, and the difference between those two moments might have nothing to do with you. What doesn’t shift like that — what doesn’t go stale or arrive too early or get overtaken by someone else — is the way you think, the depth you’ve built, the quality of attention you bring to problems. That travels with you. That’s the key that fits more than one lock.
So if one door doesn’t open, you’re not back at the beginning. You’re just standing in front of a different door, with the same key in your hand.
The Bhagavad Gita has said all of this with more precision than I’ve managed here:
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन ।
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि ॥ ४७ ॥
Quiet Reflections 