Too late is a story

Off the clock there's a different beginning waiting, and it's usually older. The instrument you wanted to learn at forty-five. The degree you stopped halfway through. The first run when you haven't run in years. Going back to dating, to painting, to a language, to a body that doesn't move like it did. Here the shame bites harder than at work, because here nobody assigned it to you. You'd be the beginner by choice, at an age when you're "supposed" to have things figured out.

Marcus Aurelius cured that with distance. Picture an earlier generation, he said — "the times of Vespasian. Thou wilt see all these things, people marrying, bringing up children, sick, dying, warring, feasting... that life of these people no longer exists at all" (Meditations 4.32, Long). Every one of them worried, like you, about looking foolish, about being too late. All of it gone now, the dignity and the embarrassment alike. Your hesitation will join them.

Against that backdrop the math is simple. The piano lessons will feel awkward whether you start them or not. The only question is whether the awkwardness buys you something. A beginner at sixty still ends up further than the person who decided sixty was too old.