It's never too late...

Two surprising things happened to me this week.

First, my son voluntarily followed me into a bookshop.

Not only that, he announced—without irony—that his English teacher had recommended Great Expectations to him so he was keen to read it.

I nearly dropped the armful of books I was planning to sneak into the house later, as if our shelves weren’t already groaning loudly enough to betray me.

Second, at an appointment with a surgeon, we were studying MRI scans. Applying the same analytical habits I use with my students, I realised I'd read something somewhere that would explain it, and cut in to summarise it neatly.

The surgeon paused, smiled, and nodded. Then he said, with unnerving seriousness: “It’s not too late, you know. You could still retrain.”

If you know us, you’ll understand why both moments were seismic.

My son usually treats books like Jenga blocks: stackable, but not for opening. And me? I know my way around biology, physics, and chemistry. But my career took the path into engineering, not medicine. Which means I’m fluent in the science, just not the scalpel.

So there we were: him, flirting with Dickens; me, apparently auditioning for radiology.

Here's the thing with teenagers: they’re perfectly capable of devouring a whole trilogy if it’s about dystopian arenas or death mazes. (The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner? No problem.)

But hand them something with yellowing pages and a surname like Dickens, and suddenly it’s the literary equivalent of eating kale.

Until, that is, someone with genuine enthusiasm steps in. His English teacher didn’t just recommend Great Expectations — he sold it to him, with the kind of conviction that makes you believe you’ll actually enjoy it. And that passion was contagious.

Then came the MRI scans. I was tracing the ghostly shapes on the film, applying the same analytical habits I use with my students and realised I'd read something somewhere that would explain it.

And the MRI moment reminded me: sometimes, all it takes is someone else to remind you of what you already know, or what you might still be capable of.

Not too late?

I chose engineering precisely because I didn’t fancy blood, or the endless exams, or carrying the weight of people’s lives on my shoulders. And yet here was a highly qualified surgeon telling me the door wasn’t shut.

I reflected that buried beneath the jokes is the truth: we all carry alternate lives in our back pocket. The ones we didn’t choose at 18. The “what ifs.” The versions of ourselves we quietly kept in the margins.

Sometimes it takes someone else to remind you those versions aren’t entirely gone.

That’s the thread between these two surprises. Both of us—me and my son—were living inside set scripts.

His: “Old books are boring.”
Mine: “Medicine is for other people, not me.”

Both felt fixed. Permanent. True. Until someone came along and rewrote the line.

Which is how life works, isn’t it?

We carry around these tired stories—too late, too hard, not for me—and forget that most of them are nonsense.

The trick is catching yourself mid-monologue and asking: But what if the opposite is also true?

I won’t be enrolling in medical school tomorrow. (Nobody panic.)

But I did leave that appointment with a small shift in perspective: maybe I’m not done deciding who I get to be.

And my son? He may or may not finish Great Expectations. He may declare it requires more stamina than a Hunger Games marathon. But even then, something has changed: he no longer believes those books are off-limits.

Not Dickens. Not medicine. Just the reminder that “too late” and “too early” are mostly myths we tell ourselves.

So this week, two unexpected things happened. My son voluntarily opened a book written in 1860. And I opened the possibility that my story isn’t finished either.

Here’s my advice: kids, don’t leave any story unread; and adults, maybe it’s time to revisit those hidden-away stories waiting for a rainy day.

Which, if you think about it, is great expectations of its own.

Nici