The Fear of Being Too Late to Start
At forty, I discovered I was born to teach.
At forty, I could no longer afford to learn how.
The recognition came while helping Arash with his science project. We were building a model solar system, and I found myself explaining planetary orbits with a patience I’d never shown at work. Created analogies, drew diagrams, repeated concepts different ways until his face lit up with understanding.
That moment—watching comprehension dawn—felt like coming home.
This was what fulfillment looked like. This was what I should have been doing my entire adult life.
But mortgages don’t pause for epiphanies.
“You’d be a good teacher,” Happy said, noticing my energy.
“Twenty years too late for that realization.”
“People change careers.”
“People without three-bedroom apartments and school fees and aging parents to support change careers.”
She didn’t argue. We both knew the math.
The window for radical professional change closes gradually, then suddenly. Family obligations seal what institutional inertia began.
I work in marketing. Fifteen years climbing a corporate ladder I never wanted to climb, selling products I don’t believe in, attending meetings that could have been emails. It pays well. It’s stable. It’s slowly hollowing me out.
But I’m good at it. That’s the trap—competence in work you don’t love, success in fields that don’t fulfill you.
“What would you teach?” Happy asked that evening.
“Anything. Everything. Just that process of helping someone understand something they didn’t understand before.”
“You know it doesn’t pay well.”
“I know.”
We sat with that reality. Teaching would mean halving my income. Abandoning security. Starting over professionally at forty-five.
Impossible with our current obligations.
I started noticing teachers differently after that. The exhaustion in their faces, the complaints about salary. But also something I envied—purpose. They knew their work mattered. Felt fulfillment I’d never experienced professionally.
My colleague Rashed left corporate work last year to teach high school. Everyone thought he was crazy.
“Massive pay cut,” another colleague whispered. “Three kids to support. What’s he thinking?”
But I saw something in Rashed after the switch. Energy. Engagement. The opposite of the slow death I was experiencing.
I asked him about it over coffee.
“Best decision I ever made,” he said.
“But the money?”
“Difficult. We downsized. Cut expenses. My wife works more. But I’m actually alive now. Before, I was just… existing.”
“Worth it?”
“Completely. Should have done it years earlier.”
But Rashed was thirty-eight when he switched. Seven years younger. Kids not yet in expensive schools. Less financial inertia.
I was forty-five with different math.
That night, I did the calculations. Teaching salary, family expenses, mortgage, parents’ medical needs. The numbers didn’t work. Not even close.
Happy watched me work through the spreadsheet.
“We could make adjustments,” she offered. “Smaller apartment, cheaper schools—”
“No. I’m not taking away from Arash’s education for my mid-life crisis.”
“It’s not a crisis if it’s your actual calling.”
“Calling doesn’t pay bills.”
She didn’t push. We both understood the trap—discovering your true work when changing work becomes impossible.
Society pretends we all find callings early. Follow clear paths toward predetermined destinations. But passion often arrives off-schedule, recognition comes late.
I was supposed to figure this out at twenty, not forty-five. Make idealistic choices before practical ones locked me in.
Instead, I’d chosen stability. Good salary, career trajectory, sensible decisions that made sense at the time.
Now those sensible decisions felt like prison walls.
“You could teach part-time,” Happy suggested. “Weekends, evenings. Keep your day job.”
I looked into it. Found community centers needing instructors, tutoring opportunities, weekend classes.
Started teaching basic computer skills to older adults on Saturday mornings. Volunteered at Arash’s school. Mentored junior colleagues at work.
Small doses of the calling I couldn’t fully embrace.
It helped. The teaching scratched an itch, provided fulfillment the day job never had.
But it also made the day job harder. Knowing what purpose felt like made purposeless work more difficult to endure.
“Is this enough?” Happy asked after a few months.
“It has to be.”
My father noticed the change. “You seem different lately.”
“Different how?”
“More engaged when you talk about the volunteer teaching. Less engaged when you talk about work.”
“Maybe I chose the wrong career.”
“At forty-five, you’re not choosing anything. You’re maintaining what you chose before.”
Brutal honesty from a man who’d worked the same job for forty years without complaint.
“Do you regret it?” I asked. “Not doing something you loved?”
He thought carefully. “I did what I needed to do. Provided for family. That was the love I chose—love for you and your mother, not love for work.”
“But what if you could have done both?”
“Then I was luckier than most. But most of us don’t get that choice.”
The cruelest timing—clarity about vocation when financial obligations demand staying in careers that drain rather than energize.
I watched my teaching students with different investment now. The older adults learning computers, the kids struggling with math. Saw myself in them—people trying to learn something new, change direction, grow despite circumstances.
They reminded me that teaching wasn’t just a career. It was a way of being, a practice, something I could do anywhere.
At work, I started explaining things differently. Mentored new employees with the same patience I showed Arash. Found purpose within profession instead of requiring profession to change.
“You’ve become the office teacher,” a colleague joked.
It was true. And it helped. Not enough, but something.
Arash asked one evening, “Baba, do you like your job?”
Dangerous question from an eleven-year-old.
“I like parts of it.”
“Which parts?”
“When I get to help people understand things. Explain concepts. Teach.”
“You should be a teacher then.”
“It’s not that simple, beta.”
“Why not?”
“Because we need money. And teaching doesn’t pay as much.”
He processed this. “So you do a job you don’t like so I can have things?”
“Kind of. But it’s more complicated than that.”
“Sounds sad.”
It was sad. But it was also reality.
That night, Happy asked, “What would you tell twenty-year-old you? If you could go back?”
“Follow the calling, not the salary.”
“Even knowing it would be harder financially?”
“Maybe. Probably. I don’t know.”
The truth was complicated. If I’d become a teacher at twenty-five, I might be fulfilled professionally but struggling financially. Might not have provided for Arash the way I had. Might regret different choices.
There’s no perfect path. Just trade-offs.
“This is the price of security,” Happy said. “Trading potential passion for actual stability.”
“You think I’m wrong to stay?”
“No. I think you’re making the choice most people make. The responsible one.”
But responsibility felt like slow suffocation sometimes.
I kept teaching on weekends. Mentoring at work. Helping Arash with homework. Finding purpose in fragments instead of the whole.
It wasn’t enough. But it was what I had.
One Saturday, an elderly student thanked me after class. “You have a gift for teaching. You should do this full-time.”
“I wish I could.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Life. Obligations. Timing.”
She nodded. “I wanted to be a painter. Raised four children instead. By the time they grew up, I’d forgotten how to hold a brush.”
“Did you resent it?”
“Sometimes. But I also loved them. That was its own kind of art.”
Maybe that was the wisdom—finding meaning in constraints rather than resenting them.
I couldn’t be a teacher professionally. But I could teach my son, my colleagues, my weekend students. Could practice my calling in small doses, find purpose within limitations.
Not ideal. But real.
Tonight I helped Arash with math homework. Watched understanding dawn. Felt fulfillment.
Tomorrow I’d return to work I didn’t love, making money we needed, maintaining security I couldn’t abandon.
Living the life I’d built instead of the life I’d discovered too late.
Both sad and okay simultaneously.
That’s what forty-five looks like—old enough to know yourself, too established to change course completely.
Practicing true calling in margins. Teaching without title. Finding purpose where it fits.
Not the story I wanted. But the story I have.
And somehow, that’s enough.