Is it too late to start again?

You ask whether it is too late as though there were a timetable for living and you had missed your train. There is no such timetable. The only lateness that matters is the habit of putting life off until tomorrow, and that habit kills young men as surely as old ones.nnI wrote my best letters near the end of my life, when I had at last withdrawn from public affairs and could attend to what mattered. I did not think: I am old, I have left it too long. I thought: I have wasted enough already, and I will not waste what remains. Claim yourself back. Gather up and guard the time that has been taken from you, stolen or simply let slip.nnAnd consider old age itself. I found that it has pleasures of its own, if you know how to use it. The appetites quieten, the need to impress fades, and the mind can turn to things it never had leisure for. A man of sixty who begins a study has as much of the future as anyone, which is to say, none guaranteed and all of today.nnSo do not measure the time left. Nobody knows it, the young least of all. Measure what you will do with the hours you are certain of, which are this one and possibly the next. Begin with those. The beginning is the part you have been avoiding, and it is usually the hardest part.

Let me give you a thought experiment, the heaviest one I know. Suppose a demon came to you in your loneliest hour and told you that this life, as you have lived it and are living it, you will have to live again, and again, without end. Every pain and every joy, every wasted year, in the same order. Would you curse him? Or would you answer that you have never heard anything more divine?nnThe question of being too late assumes you are running a race against a clock someone else set. I am not interested in that clock. I am interested in whether the life you are living is one you could affirm, want again, say yes to all the way down.nnIf the answer today is no, then the question is not whether it is too late to start. It is whether you can bear to go on as you are, knowing what you know. That is the real urgency. Not age, not opportunity, but the intolerable prospect of repeating a life you do not love.nnAnd do not start again out of regret for the past, as if you could erase it. Love your fate, the whole of it, the years you call wasted included; they made the person who is now able to ask this question. Then become who you are, at whatever age you are. There is no deadline for that. There is only the next moment, and whether you could will it eternally.

When I studied old age, what struck me most was how much of its misery is made by other people. A society that values people only for what they produce quietly informs them, at a certain age, that they are finished. Many believe it. The phrase too late often comes from outside, and is taken in as if it were a fact about one's own body.nnSo first, ask whose voice is saying it. Not every limit is real. Some are; I do not pretend that the body does not change or that every door stays open. But many are only conventions about what a woman of fifty or a man of sixty ought to want, and conventions can be refused.nnThen ask what gives a life meaning at any age. My answer was always the same: projects. Ends that reach beyond yourself, that you pursue freely and that pull you forward, whether devotion to particular people, to a cause, to work, to making something. As long as you have such ends, you are not simply waiting. You are still transcending yourself, still in motion, and age becomes a circumstance rather than a verdict.nnStarting again, then, is not about recovering youth. It is about choosing a project that is genuinely yours and committing to it, knowing that you are free and responsible for what you make of the time you have. I began the book that mattered most to me in my late thirties, having assumed until then that being a woman had never much mattered to me. It was not too late. It rarely is.