I don’t believe I’ve ever gained more wisdom from a single source than this song, which attempts to convey the most difficult lesson for us apparently to learn: the ephemerality of time. We don’t really realize and appreciate the value of certain milestones, certain eras of our lives, until they’re gone. Our children are young only once, our grandchildren, ourselves. We achieve something and bask in the afterglow for a time, attempt in vain to preserve a certain stage of our life that has outstayed its welcome, consuming valuable time better spent in some other way. Our 20’s are here, and feel limitless at the time, and then they’re gone. Our 30’s, 40’s, and then middle age arrives and we confront the death of our youth, and for many the regret of unlived time. What we didn’t do, rather than what we did. We realize that not all time is equal. The short years of our children’s childhood is priceless in comparison to the years before they were born, or even after they’ve reach adulthood. But do we realize it at the time? I’d bet far more people than who would admit it reach middle age and wonder why no one sat them down and explained to them the importance of paying attention to time itself. Why no one warned them that there is no such thing as “free time”, and why some time is far more valuable than others. If everyone were forced, when young, to live a single year at the end of their lives, would they return to their younger selves and hit the ground running? Maybe appreciate people and moments that they would otherwise not have? Time is a current that carries us along, but it does so silently, and this makes it all too easy to believe that we’re not moving at all.
