"It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” This statement, penned by George Eliot in the novel Middlemarch (1876), echoes in my head like a song that can't be forgotten, as I think about all the paths not taken and all the times life could have shaken me off like a loose thread. It was often said about Robert Frost, author of “The Road Not Taken.” The road he didn't take led him from poetry to prose and from professor at Harvard University to part-time farmer and full-time poet, which some believe may even have made his poetry stronger.
"It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
My own fear of not being able to recapture the joy and passion I felt during my youth has kept me going when I was sure that I was stepping down the wrong path. It was my fear that kept me steering in a new direction even when it seemed impractical, irrational, and downright impossible. To let go of that fear is to let go of life itself.
"It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
The thought of what could have been weighs heavily on one's mind, particularly when you are older, partly because of your advancing age and the realization that you are one step closer to your mortality. It is the threat that you may miss something before you die that causes people to cling to life too tightly. When I hear older people say “I can't think about my own death because it scares me” or “I would rather be dead than be in one of those nursing homes,” I almost get the feeling they are wishing away precious time they could spend with their families.
"It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
Though it is true, as Eliot wrote, that even when you are dying all time will not have run out and nothing impossible will have happened to you, the fact that time grows shorter all the time makes us cling to those moments of pleasure and hope we can recapture in some future existence. Like the boy who cried wolf so many times that he was left with no credibility when he did cry wolf one last time, some people get so desperate to hear their own voice before they die that they scream “wolf” every day while they are alive.
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
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