Late To Los Angeles: Chaos or Kairos?

Almost too early

One hot South Carolina summer afternoon me, my mom, and two brothers were getting ready to head to a cookout at my cousins house. The cookout started at 2:30pm and we were running late, though that wasn't such a big deal since my cousins house was only a few minutes away. We were waiting on my older brother and my mom, getting annoyed, went back to the bathroom the four of us shared to fuss at him that it was time to go.

Maybe ten minutes later, we were finally off. I was twelve at the time, and it was always fun to hang out and play with my cousins, so I was really excited about getting to our destination. But that excitement quickly faded as we approached the end of our street and saw it blocked off by police cars.

The yard of the house at the end of the street was roped off with yellow tape. As the police waved us through the small opening they’d left in the road for traffic, we all saw a body lying face down in the grass—a body my older brother later learned was his friend, Rico. Turns out, he had just been killed in a drive-by shooting, minutes before we pulled up. Had my brother not delayed us with his extra time in the bathroom, there’s a very good chance we might have been caught in the crossfire.

Kairos is another name for Divine Timing—and Divine Timing is a concept that appears across spiritual traditions, with the main idea being that everything happens in perfect timing. Perhaps not perfect in the egoic sense or from any of our personal perspectives, but perfect from the perspective of the One who sees everything happening all at once. It’s the idea of a Divine gamekeeper who not only watches everything we do, but is also the invisible hand proverbially stopping, starting, and guiding us in the direction we are most intended to go.

Oftentimes, when it feels like I’m catching every red light on the way to a destination I’m already late for, I try to keep this principle in mind. Despite how annoyed waiting makes me feel, perhaps the reason I’m being delayed is to keep me—or someone else—out of an accident.

The Cali Connection

Just yesterday, literally ten minutes before we were supposed to board, the screen outside the gate of my flight home changed in an instant from “Dallas/Fort Worth” (where my connecting flight was) to “Flight Cancelled.” Initially, I felt more annoyed than panicked. I’ve flown enough to deal with my share of cancellations, and usually they only mean a delay of a few hours. Though, usually I’m also not 2,500 miles away in a state I've only visited once before either. When I looked up the status to see what the issue was, I discovered that severe weather in Dallas had grounded all flights—and that the quickest flight back home on the same airline wouldn’t leave until tomorrow.

At that moment, the principle of divine timing popped into my head once more. Perhaps the reason my flight was cancelled, and my return trip home was delayed, was because if it hadn’t been, I—and everyone else on board—might have been forced into an emergency landing or, worse, caught in a crash. I was incredibly annoyed at the prospect of having to sleep in the airport or in a hotel overnight, but the thought that the alternative could have been spending my last moments in a sealed tube with hundreds of panicked passengers certainly softened my frustration.

I ended up booking a last-minute flight with another airline and canceling—and getting refunded for—my original flight. Again, I was super annoyed that I had to do this in the first place, but I balanced that annoyance with gratitude that I had the resources to make it happen. Ultimately, I was just glad I was still getting home the day I’d intended to.

My trip to Cali in and of itself was a consequence of Divine Timing. I'd originally intended to move to LA back in 2014 when I was still chasing my dream of becoming a rich and famous musician, but those plans were derailed after learning about my mom getting cancer. The spiritual and emotional awakening that news invoked in me killed all my dreams, to be honest—well, all but one: for my mother not to die.

And, just like with my flight being cancelled, and just like with my older brother taking too long in the bathroom, I was incredibly annoyed with whoever was “in charge” that my mom had cancer, and that I would potentially no longer be able to give her the life I’d wanted to get rich for in the first place. But if you know me, you know that now I see my mom’s diagnosis and ultimate passing as one of the biggest blessings I’ve ever received.

Getting to LA at 24 would have probably been great for my ego and image, but absolutely terrible for my soul. Los Angeles is beautiful, but from what I experienced over the past week, it is beautiful chaos. It is a city of dreams—and of broken dreams. There’s this overall vibe in the air of quiet desperation for all but the well-off. A desperation that knows LA can, and will, chew you up and spit you out if you don’t stay on your hustle.

In Chicago, I felt acknowledged. I felt supported. I felt a sense of community, even among the strangers surrounding me. But LA felt like it didn’t really care about me at all. It wasn’t personal. On the contrary, it was precisely because I was just another person—just another person who believed he was special and expected the stars to magically align for him in Los Angeles, just like so many others had believed. And it was like LA was constantly reminding me that in a place where everyone is special, no one is special—and being special would not make me exempt from its demands.

Of course, this might lead desperate people to do things they might not otherwise do. To hang with people they don’t really align with. To wear heavy masks, only because those are the faces that get them into the rooms they want to be in. And had 24-year-old Micheal gotten to LA when he wanted to, he would have done all of those things to “make it.”

For the sex-crazed, drug-curious, rock-n-roll-obsessed, and desperately insecure person I was at 24, LA wouldn’t have been good for me at all. That’s something I’ve suspected all this time—and something I know for sure now. Getting to LA for the first time at 35 allowed me to see it clearly—with eyes unclouded by desire. And what I saw was a lot of beauty and a lot of suffering. What I can say with certainty is that had I gotten there at 24, I would have contributed far more to its suffering than to its beauty, and vice versa. We would not have been good for each other back then.

Are we good for each other now? Perhaps. There’s a lot to like about LA, but my favorite part was the weather. I visited during a supposed heat wave where the temperature stayed in the mid-nineties each day. But unlike the humid, oven-like heat I’m used to, this was dry heat, which meant it was always at least ten degrees cooler in the shade—and there was almost always a breeze blowing, too. I thought I had a sweat problem for most of my life, but it turns out I’ve just been living in the swamp biome for too long, because I could walk for miles in LA without barely breaking a sweat.

Whether in LA specifically or California in general, I can definitely see myself living there now. But I genuinely feel like whether I do or don’t is not up to me anymore—and Divine Timing is the reason for that as well.

Patience is another word for Surrender

If you read enough spiritual literature, you’re eventually going to come across the idea of surrender—of detaching, letting go of both control and outcomes, and allowing a higher force to guide your life. Of being patient—not rushing to make things happen just because you want them to, but allowing things to naturally unfold in the way that’s most aligned.

I think for most of us, surrender seems like a conscious choice—something we decide to do. But can it truly be surrender if it’s willing? Or does surrender only come through the dissolution of will? The more time I spend in this space of surrender, the more I feel that no one would ever consciously choose it. Instead, we are made to surrender by seeing our conscious efforts fall short, again and again.

To surrender means to willingly forfeit your resources. And no one—or at least no one’s ego—wants to forfeit their resources, because for most of us, resources equal security. I think that’s why true surrender is such an incredibly rare place to arrive at on the spiritual journey. Because even if we have no problem giving up our time, money, or freedom—none of us wants to completely give up our will. Not because we necessarily think we know better than God, but because will—the idea that we have power to control our lives—is what most makes us feel human. So to surrender one’s will doesn’t just feel like losing control; it also feels like dying in a way.

I’m currently at the dissolution-of-will part of the spiritual path. It genuinely feels like I no longer have any power to affect or direct where my life goes from here. This is not at all something I want—at least not consciously. Consciously, I’d like to decide between Chicago or LA or some other place to establish roots. But it truly doesn’t feel like it’s my choice. It feels like I’m being held—not back, but in place—while the Gamekeeper aligns other things in the background. And only when the timing is right will it be revealed to me where I’m headed.

Right now, I can barely see ten feet ahead of me—and it’s incredibly disorienting at times. Despite my best efforts, I’ve been running into delay after delay, to the point where I’ve had no choice but to accept that things are not moving according to my own personal timing. And it’s not even that things are going wrong, per se—I’m just having to wait longer for them than I originally planned to.

I’ve been doing my very best to fight through the fog, but it feels never-ending. I’m so tired that complete surrender is all but inevitable. Like an animal that has been stalked for days, an exhaustion-induced collapse feels just around the corner. And… I’m kind of looking forward to it. Because I have a feeling that then, and only then, will the fog clear—and I’ll discover that the entire time I was wading in the fog, I was being guided exactly where I needed to be. I’m excited to discover where that place is—and in the meantime, I’m going to do my best to be still until it’s time for me to know.

Thank you to my first paid subscriber

A couple of weeks ago, completely out of the blue, I got a notification of my first paid subscriber! I’ve never advertised this newsletter as paid, so it completely caught me off guard. I’ve long toyed with the idea of having free and paid tiers, but it never felt quite right to me because this newsletter has always been an offering of my heart.

But getting a paid subscriber despite that felt like a gentle nudge from the Universe that perhaps I should revisit the idea. The core of this newsletter—what you’ve been reading for nearly two years now 🤯—will always be free. But starting next week, I’m going to begin offering extras to paid members. At first, these will take the form of weekly reflection questions to contemplate (or use as journal prompts), along with the opportunity to share those reflections with me and have a dialogue around them. I’m also considering sharing more private writings with the paid tier—so if you’d like to peer further into the mind of a maniac, that’ll be your chance, lol.

I don’t know why Divine Timing plays out the way it does. I don’t know why the same timing that prevented us from being caught in a shootout also led to someone else losing their life. I don’t know why my mother died at age 50 while my father will turn 60 at the beginning of 2026. I don’t know why some people move to LA, get “discovered” on the street within days, and are handed careers that change their lives, while others are born and die there in poverty. I don’t know why any of these things happen the way they do. But I do know that it is all divinely orchestrated.

And I do know that, despite how alone I feel at times, my steps are ordered. I’m working to fully embrace this surrender because I trust that I’m being guided somewhere even better than what my ego could conjure up on its own. Or, I’m being guided toward certain death. Which, honestly, doesn’t sound that bad either—because at least then I wouldn’t have to deal with this shit anymore 😩😂

There's so much more to say about my recent experiences but they'll have to come later because even getting this out with jet-lagged brain has been quite the challenge.

With love,

Micheal Sinclair 💜