These are lyrics from Pink Floyd’s “Time” from their album “The Dark SIde of the Moon”. It’s definitely one of my favorite songs of all time, all because of the scarily real and universal message it conveys, that will only become more relevant the older you get.  I’ve listened to this song countless times, but only recently have I been really listening to the lyrics, and it scares me how much it reflects my life. Line for line, it hits hard with reality, and exposes fears I avoided thinking about for a long time. All great works of art make you feel something, and for me, this song evokes great complex emotions that will embed it in my mind forever. 

Ticking away the moments that makes up a dull day

Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way…

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown,

Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of  lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain…

We’ve all been young and bored, there seems to be so much time we have in a day that all you can do is waste it, hanging out with your friends, lying around in the sun, playing games and messing around amusing ourselves. When you’re young, time is the last concern on your mind. We go by each day just waiting for our real lives to start. But in all this waiting and wasting time, life slowly has been passing us by. 

You were young and life was long, and there is time to kill today…

And then one day you find, ten years has got behind you

No-one told you when to run, 

You’ve missed the starting gun

For me, this is the most powerful and hard hitting part of this song. We don’t feel the time we waste, hours become days, days become weeks, weeks become months, and before you know it, it’s been years and you have nothing to show for it. Life doesn’t show you where to go, or when to do it. We’re all just lost souls searching for purpose and meaning in this terrifying world. 

I’ve been waiting for someone my whole life to show me where I’m supposed to go, who I’m supposed to be, as if someday a person holding a neon sign that says “Your Destiny Here!” will appear and somehow make all my problems go away. There will never be that someone, you will never hear the starting gun, because the only person that can make that decision is yourself. And I’ve been putting it off for far too long.

From the conclusion of this verse, we hear a hauntingly beautiful guitar solo by David Gilmour, the first part of the solo is fast and full of desperation, embodying the anxiety of trying fruitlessly to catch up with time, the pain of watching your life pass before your eyes, like grains of sand passing through your hands, the harder you try to hold on, the faster it will slip away. The second part of the solo is slower, more melodic and drawn out, it signifies a melancholic acceptance, a promise that everything has to come to an end, for time’s arrow neither stands still nor reverses, it merely marches on. 

And you run and you run, to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking.

Racing around, to come up behind you again.

The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older,

Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.

Contrasted by wasting time in our youth, adult life is mostly about chasing time. Everyday is a brutal gauntlet, trying to get everything done just so you can reach tomorrow and do it all over again. The sun is still the same star that shined on your face as a child, but the meaning is different now. Everytime it sinks below the horizon and rises again, you’ve used up another day in your finite life.

We go from wasting time, to chasing time without warning, there’s no bold line separating early adolescence to adulthood, it just happens. There never seems to be enough time. You don’t feel individual days anymore, everything seems to blur together as you scramble to get your life together, juggling work, education and relationships, desperately searching for the person you’re meant to be.

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time…

Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines…

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way

The time is gone, the song is over

Thought I had something more to say…

it sneaks up on you, your plans to do great things get pushed back, one day, a month, a year, a lifetime that you’ll never get back. All the great ideas left in drafts, abandoned, the world you created in your mind gets forgotten.  And the worst part is, you don’t notice it until it’s too late.

When this song ends, there is no solid resolution, no majestic fanfare, not everything is resolved cleanly, nicely tied up with little bow ties on top, it just ends. It’s similar to how our lives really are, when it ends no one  is ever ready for it, we leave lots of things unfinished, things we wished we had done, words we wish we had said. 

 None of us know how much time we have left. My biggest fear is that at the end of life, I wouldn’t have done anything worthwhile, I’m afraid of wasting this opportunity of life, finding out that I don’t have anything meaningful to say in the end, that I’ve contributed nothing to this world. I want to be a part of something bigger than myself, I want to be able to feel that the time I’ve spent on this earth is not wasted, that I’ve made a difference.

If there is one thing certain in this life, it’s that the slow march of time cannot be reasoned with, cannot be persuaded, can never be stopped. Every second of every day our lives are passing by, marching us ever closer to the end, and there’s nothing we can do about it. No matter who you are, no matter where you are in the world, we all have to face the consequences of time and our own eventual mortality, it’s the price we all pay for life.

No matter how we try, nothing is forever, because of this, all that we can do is be grateful for the time we do have, and live life to the fullest before time washes it all away, like tears in the rain. And for me, the cold hard fact that we don’t have forever, only means that the time we do have is all the more precious and beautiful. Whatever time we have left, let's make sure we don’t waste it.