Hey remember when I was writing about philosophy and things like that? Well this morning is a bit of a return to that sort of thing as we examine one of my all time favorite songs for its connection to anxiety and recovery. Today we’re looking at “Time”, by Pink Floyd.
Ticking away the moments that make 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…
Was Roger Waters writing about agoraphobia?
He was not, but when you look at the first verse of “Time”, you can almost imagine that he was. The lyrics are strangely familiar for anyone that’s spent any time stuck in a safe place hoping for something to break the spell of agoraphobia. Often the days can feel wasted and a sense of hopelessness and despair can kick in. I will never forget the feeling of trying to stay busy, making projects that I could do inside my bubble, and sometimes just trying to kill time while knowing that I was missing chunks of my life as time passed.
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
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 second verse speaks to our propensity to “get better tomorrow”. We grow tired of the routine inside the bubble yet we rationalize our avoidance and inertia by reasoning that there will be time tomorrow to make changes and “lick this thing”. We wait, hoping that we will get better so we can start or re-join life once that has happened. But really, life is still happening even as we imagine it to be on hold.
I can remember one rather cold day in December when I was struck by the realization that tomorrow was too late. My kids were growing up. The world was still spinning. Lives were happening all around me. I was - as per the song - missing the starting gun. Day after day. I felt an immense sense of loss over the time that had I had “frittered and wasted”.
That was not an easy day for me. I felt like such a failure. I don’t ever want to feel like that again. But at the same time, that harsh reality made me come face to face with the idea that I could not recover, then live again. I had to start living again as part of my recovery. I could no longer think of them as two different things. I was either going to start living as best I could while getting better, or I would find that “ten years had got behind me.”
That was a turning point for me, at least on an emotional level. I still had work to do, but this realization about the nature of time the relationship between life and recovery helped me find both motivation and courage to get things going.
When I wrote The Anxious Truth, I spent some time on this idea. In lesson 5.7 of that book I wrote this:
“Recovery happens. But life also happens. It’s going to be essential to integrate the two. They exist side-by-side. More accurately, they are entwined with each other. You can’t put your recovery in a box all by itself. If life is a soup, then recovery is an ingredient in that soup. You can’t take the salt out of the soup once it’s in there. In the same way, the process of recovering from an anxiety disorder cannot be segregated from the rest of your life. While actively executing your recovery plan, you are still making “life soup”.”
As I write this edition of The Anxious Morning, I am listening to “Time” again. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard this song, but tonight I am struck by one of the last verses:
Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
And when I come home cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones beside the fire.
Whereas Waters started the song talking about the need to leave the confines of home to start living - rather than waiting - I can’t help but see this verse as an acknowledgment of how different it feels to return home once one has ventured out into the world. In that light, he hit the nail on the head. Spending time at “home” in the safe bubble used to feel restrictive and suffocating. It was stifling. Home was slowly become a prison rather than a place of rest and refuge.
But once out and doing what I needed to do - difficult work that I hated doing but had to do - returning home felt different. Home became a good place to be again. I didn’t feel restless at home. I felt accomplished even when the accomplishments were tiny. I felt that my tired at the end of a day was a good tired. It was no longer a thin, fragile, unfulfilling tired that teetered ever on the edge of fear and panic. It was a satisfying tired and yes, it felt good to “warm my bones beside the fire” in a figurative sense.
I guess my point here - other than indulging in a bit of creative lyrical interpretation and Pink Floyd appreciation - is that waiting for someone or something to show us the way can put us in a bad place. As hard as it may be to accept this, time is passing and life is happening even while we wait and hope. And while leaping into what feels like the dangerous unknown is scary and oh so difficult, the suffering of that leap is better than the slow suffering we endure while we “hang on in quiet desperation”.
Time. It can be our enemy, or it can show us the way. We get to pick.
Thanks for reading today. I really appreciate it.
“Time” Songwriters: David Jon Gilmour / George Roger Waters / Nicholas Berkeley Mason / Richard William Wright
Time lyrics © T.R.O. Inc., Universal Music Publishing Group
“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.”
- Michael Altshuler
Every Friday I’ll share one of my favorite quotes. They’ll often have direct application in recovery, but sometimes they’re just generally funny, inspiring, or thought-provoking. I hope you enjoy them.
158. Time