Inside me lives a guitarist who never learned guitar.
I can see him clearly. He sits in a room with afternoon light, fingers moving across strings, making music that moves people to tears. He plays at small gatherings, nothing famous, but when he plays, people stop talking. They listen. They feel something they cannot name.
This guitarist has lived inside me for forty years. I have never touched a guitar.
When I was fifteen, I wanted to learn. I asked my father for lessons. He said music was distraction from studies. I accepted this. I was a good son. I buried the guitarist inside me and focused on mathematics. I became an engineer. I have had a respectable career. The guitarist remained unborn.
I think about him sometimes. What songs would he have written? What would it feel like to create something beautiful with my own hands? I will never know. The guitarist exists only as potential—energy stored but never released.
Physics has a term for this. Potential energy. A ball at the top of a hill contains energy by virtue of its position. It could roll down. It could do work. But until it moves, the energy remains stored, waiting, unrealized.
We are all hills covered with balls that never rolled.
My friend Nasreen wanted to be a writer. She had talent—even as a teenager, her words had weight. Teachers praised her essays. She dreamed of novels, of stories that would make strangers understand themselves better. But her family needed income. She became an accountant. She is good at it. She has helped many businesses succeed. But late at night, she still writes sentences in her head that no one will ever read.
Inside her lives a novelist who never finished a novel. The novelist has written hundreds of books—all of them imaginary, all of them lost.
The saddest sentences in any language begin with “If I had…” If I had taken that job. If I had moved to that city. If I had said yes when she asked. If I had said no when he demanded. These sentences carry the weight of entire unlived lives. They are heavy because they can never be tested. We will never know what would have happened. We can only imagine, and imagination is both gift and curse.
I had a chance once to start a business. A friend proposed a partnership. The idea was good—I can see now that it would have worked. But I was afraid. I had a stable job, a family to support. The risk seemed too large. I said no. My friend found another partner. The business succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. My friend retired wealthy at fifty. I worked until sixty-five.
I do not resent my friend. I resent myself—but only sometimes. Mostly I have made peace with my choice. But inside me lives an entrepreneur who never took the risk. He is bolder than me. He trusted himself more. He lives a different life, one I can only glimpse in dreams.
The cruelest truth about potential is this: it might exceed our achievements. The person we could have become might be greater than the person we are. We will never know because we never tried. We chose safety over possibility. We chose the known over the unknown. We chose comfort over growth.
I am not saying this was wrong. Sometimes safety is wisdom. Sometimes the risk would have destroyed us. But sometimes—and this is what haunts me—sometimes we chose small lives when larger ones were available. Sometimes we said no to ourselves before the world had a chance to say no to us.
Fear does this. Fear and procrastination and the weight of circumstances. We tell ourselves we will try tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes next year. Next year becomes never. The potential energy stays stored until we forget it was ever there.
But there is another way to see this.
Unexpressed potential is not only tragedy. It is also infinite possibility. The guitarist inside me has never failed. He has never played a wrong note, never embarrassed himself at a performance, never realized that perhaps his talent was ordinary after all. As long as he remains unborn, he remains perfect. He could have been anything. He could have been everything.
This is the strange comfort of never trying. You cannot fail at what you never attempt. Your potential remains unblemished by reality. You can always believe you would have been great, because you never tested the belief.
I know people who have found peace this way. They carry their unrealized selves gently, like old photographs of someone they once loved. They do not mourn what might have been. They simply acknowledge that life offers more paths than any person can walk, and choosing one means losing others.
But I also know that deathbed regrets focus on what we didn’t do, not what we did. The old do not say, “I wish I hadn’t tried that.” They say, “I wish I had tried.” The unlived lives haunt us more than the mistakes we made while living.
I am fifty-seven now. Not old, but not young. The guitarist inside me is fifty-seven too—still waiting, still unborn. Is it too late?
I do not know. Perhaps it is too late to become what I might have become at twenty. But perhaps it is not too late to become something. Perhaps the potential energy can still convert to kinetic, even now. Perhaps the ball can still roll, even after forty years on the hilltop.
Last week I did something I have never done. I walked into a music store and touched a guitar. Just touched it. Felt the strings under my fingers. The shopkeeper asked if I wanted to try. I said no. I was not ready. But I touched it. That is something. That is more than I have done in forty years.
Maybe next week I will go back. Maybe I will try a chord. Maybe the guitarist inside me will finally take his first breath, even if he is old and his fingers are stiff and he will never play at gatherings where people stop talking to listen.
It does not have to be perfect. It only has to be real.
This is what I am learning at fifty-seven. Potential is beautiful, but reality is better. A badly played chord is worth more than a perfectly imagined symphony. A finished paragraph matters more than an unwritten masterpiece. A risk that fails teaches more than a safety that succeeds.
Inside all of us live the people we never became. The artists and entrepreneurs and lovers and adventurers we buried under fear and practicality. They wait there still. Some will wait forever. But some—maybe some—can still be born.
It is not too late.
It is only too late when we stop believing it isn’t.
The guitarist is still inside me. He is old now, but he is patient. He has waited forty years. He can wait a little longer.
But not much longer.
Not much longer at all.