When it comes to things we regret not starting sooner … The best time was always five or 10 or 20 or 40 or however many years ago.
But the next-best time is now.
The saying “Don’t cry over spilt milk” exists for a reason.
I’m not going to tell you don’t cry. I myself cry all the time over various flavors of spilt milk, both in my personal life and as an activist. (Not that I can ever entirely separate those two, but.) There are some really very sad regrets for missed chances and lost time. And a good cry can be a necessary part of moving forward.
But then, we have to get busy right now. Planting trees, learning skills, owning a transgression, making amends to the planet and to fellow human beings, learning a better way, picking up dropped threads of old conversations. Speaking up about something we needed to speak up about a long time ago.
Until someone invents a time-machine where we can go back and have a do-over — which I’m really not sure we want, because wouldn’t different people then be having different do-overs of different stuff, and wouldn’t that take a lot of additional time, and result in many tangled threads in the space-time continuum? — our best option is right now.