Is it too late to start over?

What happens if we should begin again and do not? One thing is sure: the risks of not pursuing our deepest gifts, our strongest passions, our need for higher purpose in life also are serious, not only for ourselves but for those around us as well, whose happiness quotient will be affected by our own. Frustration with what is, the ennui that develops in the face of what has never been, and the sense of emptiness that comes from leaving behind part of ourselves that could have been pursued but was not, are serious breaches of life.

Obviously there is a public risk in allowing ourselves to grow slowly, steadily into the resolution of the self, but there is even worse risk if we attempt to ignore it. Frustration triggered more by what is missing in life than by what we are dealing with there saps our energy for anything else. We get irritable with others. We get even more disgusted with the self in us that we have learned to dislike. Inertia fills the space where love of life used to be. Emptiness colors and smothers everything we attempt to do.

Clearly, “It’s too late for that now” is too great a burden to bear. When is it too late to start over? Never. Not as long as we are alive and seeking even more out of life. Beethoven, deaf as stone, knew that and went on composing long after he could hear what he wrote.

Life is lived in stages. Everything in one stage is simply a prelude to the next, where the lessons will be even more life-giving than before and past learning will take on new value.

“We are always beginning to live,” the Roman poet Manilius wrote in the first century, “but are never living.” We are always becoming, never at any given moment totally and finally complete. The only answer, then, to the question of whether we should start over again is to do what we must in every stage and be ready, when the time comes, to go on living fully in the next one.

–from Following the Path: The Search of a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Joy by Joan Chittister