All those grammars and dictionaries and audiobooks still line shelves throughout my house, and over the decades I've looked at them through varying lenses: desire, disappointment, discomfort. All these unused relics! What a waste of money, what a naïve exercise in wishful thinking. But that changed when I stumbled across the following sentence in Alexander Argüelles' "Path of the Polyglot":
Although I had no time to use them then, I began acquiring grammars, manuals, and tapes in a systematic fashion so as to build a language learning resource center for my future studies.
In an instant, my dusty shelves were reframed. Indeed, I had built quite a resource center for myself – I just hadn't realized it was for me at 55, not me at 25 or 30 or 40. What a wonderful, magical sentence: two dozen words with the power to rewrite the story I told myself. I hadn't spent decades failing to learn more languages; I'd spent decades preparing to learn them, when the joys of raising children and chasing careers had run their course.
Now they have, and here I am.