It took me 25 years to read a book, and why that’s okay

My wife and I are at a stage now where we have known each other for more than half our lives. When you’ve been together for this long, you sometimes become convinced that some things will never change. For instance, there are certain foods that Monica desperately hopes that I will like, and eat. I, too, have such a list on her. But that just doesn’t change, and we remain steadfastly loyal to some of these choices. For instance, no matter how many times she begs me, I cannot bring myself to eat an omelette. She never stops trying though.

It’s equally true of personality traits, and habits, and things that we never ever seem to do, or start doing. For instance I could never possibly go to a gym for weight training, no matter how good it is for me. I will simply not listen to jazz music, no matter how hard she tries to convince me otherwise.

But is it really true that some things never change, and that there are some things we will never start doing? Two books come to mind. Monica’s a voracious reader, and early on in our relationship, she told me about Kunta Kintei, and why ‘Roots’ by Alex Haley is a transformational book. Over time, we got engaged, married, moved to a different country, and became parents. But that one question remained a constant companion – ‘when are you going to read Roots’? She never gave up, and I never said no. One day, I thought, one day.

Cut to the lockdown in 2020, and my walking increased significantly. I also became more regular on Audible. And so it was, two decades or so later, that I finally acquiesced, and ‘read’ Roots. Half way through the book I was so gripped by it that I used both the Audio and the ‘Visual’ versions of the book – reading it was so much faster than listening to it, even at 1.2x.

Life is not the same after ‘Roots’.

I realise that this isn’t the only instance where I’ve picked up things this late. For instance, I always said to myself, ‘I can sing and play rudimentary guitar, I can never write my own songs’. I was convinced of this narrative about myself. One simple incident changed all that. One night, in Autumn 2008, my closest friends and I were jamming in London. One chap said, ‘why do we always sing songs written by other people? Shame we don’t write our own.‘ That comment, made in passing, was forgotten in a few minutes. Or was it? Turns out that three of us, separately, started writing our own songs, in a few months. I was 36 at that point, quite set in my ways, convinced of musical abilities and my musical inabilities. It’s not like I took any training. It was just a switch in the mind. I’ve written and composed over 30 songs since then.

My journey on writing a blog has been the same. Monica’s been telling me to write a blog for at least a decade. I thought I’d never do it. But here we are. After Lata Mangeshkar passed away, I started writing mini posts, one for each day, for 92 days. During that period in 2022, I realized that now was as good a time as any to start writing, finally.

These experiences fill me with a lot of hope. They convince me that the feeling of ‘it hasn’t happened all these years, it’ll never happen now’ is simply wrong. Plain and simple wrong. No matter how many months or years have passed, you are never too late. There is always today. There is always tomorrow. Once you start, no matter how late, you do it more often, and it becomes a part of your identity. All these years later, ‘singer songwriter’ is part of my identity. It is a part of me that I never thought existed.

And that is why, my friends, even if you have stalled on something for decades, or you convince yourself that you simple cannot do x, or y, do please reconsider. You may surprise yourself.

I did mention two books, didn’t I. As it turns out, I confess to have read ‘Fountainhead’ only in 2022, at the age of 50. For what it’s worth, Howard Roarke has transformed my outlook of what and who we should live for.