It’s Never Too Late
Time and its handling are a highly subjective matter. Every culture, and even every person, tries to classify it into well-demarcated stages, but it is still impossible to do so.
How far does childhood go? Before they said that until the age of seven when “the use of reason” was reached. Now we know that it can reach 90 years, even if the body does not know it.
Just as 10-year-olds sometimes appear asking themselves transcendental questions about the world and its meaning, we also find 70-year-olds who get angry if someone denies them a chocolate.
A few decades ago 20-year-olds were ready to get married and start a home. Today this is considered an outburst. If we consult what happens in reality we can only come to the conclusion that it is really never too early, nor too late for most experiences in life.
The routine and the changes
That ” Old parrot does not learn to speak ” is surely valid for parrots, but not for human beings.
We are endowed with a brain with infinite possibilities. It is very true that it slows down over the years, but it never becomes entirely inefficient, except with death.
Many times our life does not correspond to what we really want it to be. It’s easy to get sucked into routine and commitments, and think that living is doing work, coping with a fairly happy family, and having the odd escape for fun.
Although most of us have dreamed of learning to play a musical instrument, or falling in love again, or taking an extraordinary trip, sometimes we come to think that the time to realize those great dreams is over.
An economic crisis is coming and we lose our jobs. Our partner asks for a divorce or announces that he wants to move. Someone decisive for us dies or a new technology appears that leaves us illiterate.
Those moments of change remind us that time is not a continuous, ascending line. But they also evoke in us all that we could become or do when we see that the next page of our lives is completely blank.
We can always renew ourselves
The good thing about crises is that they force us to examine the different directions our life can take. Sometimes, it is simply impossible to return to the lifestyle that we led, either because there is an external factor that prevents it, or because we feel that we cannot continue living as we have been doing.
It is in those moments of change that a kind of wonderful madness that we have always carried inside can appear. We then ask ourselves “why not?” Why not go find that person with whom we had a distance, but who still has an important place in our lives? Why not stop once and for all that work that seems to be invented by our worst enemy? Why not learn to play the piano, as we so often dream of it? Why not open your arms to a new love and look for it in environments hitherto unknown to us?
We tend to become more attached to the lifestyle that we usually lead. We have a hard time believing that it is possible to live in a different way. We do not know how far we are capable of going when the flame of a new desire for change burns.
It is never too late to live, or to love, or to learn, or to dream. In those fields we are eternally adolescents. There always lives the eternal brave adventurer that we all carry inside and who will go out to seek good fortune if we recognize that while we are alive, time belongs to us.
