It’s Only Too Late When You Decide It Is
Life is all about learning, experiencing, potential, and possibilities.
No, I’m not about to get all spiritual on you or otherwise hooky-spooky. This is not some impractical, pie-in-the-sky idealism I’m sharing. This is drawing back the curtains and opening the blinds to really, truly see what’s out there.
Almost all the ideas of lack, scarcity, and insufficiency are bullshit. They’re not true, they just exist because someone is trying to make money, control people and things, or are based on a false belief held and retained without question for a long time.
What’s more, nearly everything we’re told is lacking, scarce, or insufficient can be replaced. Or if not replaced, supplemented. A perfect example of this is fossil fuels. There is only so much oil in the ground, and that’s why gas prices rise and fall with little to no real logic for why.
Yet to address potential lack and scarcity, there’s the supplement of hybrid cars. Gas and electric combined. Or you have the replacement for gas in all-electric and/or hydrogen-fueled cars. These make any potential lack, scarcity, and insufficiency of oil and gas pretty flimsy, in truth.
The biggest problem is when these notions of lack, scarcity, and insufficiency creep into your psyche and you start to see intangibles through that lens. Time, love, joy, peace, and even happiness appear to have limits.
Hence, the idea of “too late” kills all sorts of goals, dreams, potential, and possibility.
Who decides that it’s too late?
The idea that it’s too late for this, that, or the other thing is a construct. It’s about as artificial as anything can be. This notion is a product of the scarcity mindset.
Who chooses what “too late” is? Is there a giant, celestial clock that only certain people have access to? No. Too late only exists when you apply it.
For example, one of the newest fencers I’ve been working with over the past few months is 73 years old. Was it/is it too late for him to learn to fence? No. Just because I started at 19 doesn’t mean that that’s the one and only option. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
The idea of “too late” is based on utter and total bullshit. That’s why and how a 70-year-old woman runs her first marathon, an 80-year-old nonbinary gets a master’s degree, and a 100-year-old keeps cooking in his restaurant after decades of doing so. They refuse to accept the lack, scarcity, insufficiency, and limitations of “too late”.
Who decides that it’s too late? You do.
You make the choices and decisions
While extenuating circumstances, random happenstance, and the overall isness of life sometimes just is, when all is said and done, you get to choose who, what, where, how, and why you are.
Yes, that’s often easier said than done. And other factors will ramp the difficulty up or down. Making choices for who, what, where, how, and why you are is easier in the United States for a white, cis-gendered male than for a black person, a non-binary, or a female. All get to choose and decide how their life is, but the challenges to overcome various obstacles are vastly different.
The notion of “too late” is the acceptance of someone else’s definition. It’s only truly too late when you choose and decide that. If you believe it’s too late to turn around this batshit crazy, hateful government, for example, you’re choosing to live in dread, fear, and uncertainty.
No, you can do little or nothing to change this batshit crazy, hateful government. But you can choose and decide how you live your life, what experiences you seek to have, who you desire to spend your time and energy on, and so on. You can focus on your being and wellbeing.
However, there’s another false narrative that gets tacked onto lack, scarcity, insufficiency, and limits. The idea of selfishness.
It’s not selfish to see that it’s not too late
You are the only you that there is. In that body you call your own, experiencing this life, you’re it. It is not selfish to try new things, have new experiences, and seek out new things to choose and decide.
Selfishness is not what most people think it is. When you end a relationship, and the other person says you selfishly hurt them, unless you knowingly, intentionally acted to cause them pain, it’s not on you. It’s on them. You’re not selfish for ending a toxic relationship, setting boundaries with people who drain you of time and energy, or anything else that you do to protect your mental, emotional, spiritual, and/or physical health/wellness/wellbeing.
Selfishness is a billionaire like Elon Musk actively stripping people of needed benefits and assistance to make himself richer and more “powerful.” Selfishness is the jerk at every office party who takes more than his fair share of cake and leaves someone else without. Genuine, actual selfishness is always a matter of malice of forethought and choices made.
Hence, if you have the desire to do, have, be, or try something new, it’s not selfish and it’s never too late. Not unless you accept that it is. And it’s not in any way, shape, or form selfish to change your life and be/have/do different things nobody expects.
It’s only too late when you decide it is for you
We human beings get about 80 years to live life. We are not merely here to survive, but to thrive. The resources, both tangible and intangible, are abundant beyond your wildest imagination. There’s more than enough material and immaterial things for everyone, everywhere.
It’s only too late when you decide that it’s too late for you. When you focus on the world outside of yourself and see that it’s too late to change, you subconsciously apply that to you and your life as well.
The power to choose and decide things, both simple and abstract, is what makes human beings such incredible creators and destroyers. When you stop and see that for what it is, you open yourself to more potential and possibilities than you can experience in any one lifetime. It’s only too late when you decide it is.
What do you think it’s too late to do with your life that it might not be too late to do at all?
PS – This is the 700th consecutive week I’ve written this blog about Pathwalking and all that goes into conscious reality creation. Proof it’s never too late to learn new things.
This is the seventh-hundredth (700) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to repost and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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