It's Okay To Let The Days Go By

It shouldn’t be any secret that I’m a music buff. I learned to play my first musical instrument when I was 5 years old, and I’ve been collecting music since I was able to buy my first cassette tape. I guess you all now know for sure that I’m a child of the pre-CD era.

Well, as I was recovering from bronchial and throat infections last weekend, Cheryl and I decided to attend a concert (the tickets had been bought before the illnesses struck) by Pink Talking Fish.

Pink Talking Fish is a cover/tribute band of sorts, in that they play setlists constructed entirely of other musicians’ material, as their name suggests, for the most part songs by Pink Floyd, The Talking Heads and Phish. I can’t recommend their music enough.

On Saturday, they played a Halloween-themed concert event in Asbury Park by covering Pink Floyd’s seminal “Dark Side of the Moon” album, interspersing songs by The Talking Heads and Phish between classics like “Breathe,” “Brain Damage,” and “Money.”

Let me be clear – I love “Dark Side of the Moon” – the production work on the album remains immaculate to this day, I can sing almost every guitar solo by heart (but I’m rubbish for lyrics) and overall the suite deserves its standing as one of the greatest rock albums every recorded, if not the best.

But let’s face it. “Dark Side of the Moon,” like much of Pink Floyd’s catalogue, is depressing. Particularly in its focus on death and fear of mortality. To me, the centerpiece of the album is “Time.”

The song is full of brilliant David Gilmour lyrics suggestive of mortal anxiety:

“And then one day you find ten years have got behind you./No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”

“The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older/Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.”

“Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time/Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines.”

Every time I hear it, I re-examine all of the “frittering” and “wasting” I’ve done with the time that was given to me. I didn’t really leave home until 22. I didn’t really have much of a long-term relationship until the same age. I didn’t get a bachelor’s degree until I was 28. I didn’t start my career until I was 30. I’ve done a hell of a lot of frittering.

Every time I hear “Time,” I think about the finite bounds on my life, and how they always feel like they’re holding me down. At the recent Schwab IMPACT conference in Washington, D.C., a presenter mentioned that advisors’ could think of their clients lives in three 8,888-day segments (approximately 25 years): Birth to gradualtion from college, graduation from college to mid-life crises, and mid-life crises to death. I’m well into my second 8,888 days – nearing the top of the hill, if you will – on the old conception of longevity and life.

And I never do find the time to do all the things I want to. I want to go back to school and learn a new trade. I want to have kids. I want to develop side gigs and hustles to feel more productive and generate additional income. I want to travel. I want to start playing music again. I want to be financially independent – and I want to do it myself without thinking about or using my family’s wealth. I want, I want, I want. All of the time-anxiety makes me feel regret that I wasn’t doing any of this stuff before – and any failure to make progress leads to more fear, anxiety and regret.

But before Pink Talking Fish finished their set on Saturday, somewhere between “Any Colour You Like” and “Brain Damage,” they dove into a very different classic song: “Once in a Lifetime” by The Talking Heads.

David Byrne has a way of writing lyrics that make you think, but I’ve never considered “Once in a Lifetime” to be one of those songs. Most of the song consists of his manic ranting of rhetorical questions:

“And you may find yourself in a beautiful house/With a beautiful wife/And you may ask yourself, well/How did I get here?”

But it also includes a refrain that responds directly to David Gilmour’s time-anxiety.

“Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down/Letting the days go by, water flowing underground.”

David Byrne would have us “surrender to the flow” (to borrow a Phish lyric) – time passes no matter what you do. Things are going to happen to you no matter what you do. You inevitably will change, and more often than not, evolve for the better and make progress no matter what you do.

And because it can happen without much intention or effort, one can feel like an imposter.

“This is not my beautiful wife… This is not my beautiful house.”

And then, buried near the back of the song amidst a repeated refrain of “Same as it ever was,” a point where radio stations may already be fading out the volume, Byrne delivers the master stroke against Gilmour’s time anxiety:

“Time isn't holding us up/Time isn't after us.”

To me, Byrne is telling us not to worry about “Letting the days go by,” because time as we know it is just an arbitrary measure, and it flows and feels differently for all of us. There is always time to make things better. There is always time to evolve. There is always time enough for accomplishments and achievements. We can’t let ourselves be dragged down by time anxiety. We shouldn’t measure out the remainder of our lives with coffee spoons like some sort of modern J. Alfred Prufock.

David Byrne has it right!

I’ll close with what has become a cliché motivational quote, but nevertheless one of my favorites as I proceedethrough middle age:

“It's Never Too Late To Be What You Might Have Been.” – George Eliot