Time Stand Still

Time stand still

I'm not looking back

But I want to look around me now

Time stand still

See more of the people and the places that surround me now

Freeze this moment a little bit longer

Make each sensation a little bit stronger

Experience slips away

Neil Peart celebrated a birthday the other day. If you ask me who he is I might throat punch you. OK, maybe not, actually I won't, but you should know he's the drummer and main lyricist for Rush. That woman repelling band of misfits from Toronto that I grew up on. These virtuoso's of their chosen instruments, that could make themselves sound like so much more than they really were, are for me, a musical example of something that was greater than the sum of their parts. They each played their instruments as well as anyone had before, together they simply were legendary in their mastery.

I read an interview in which Neil listed his ten favourite songs from Rush and I was surprised to find that he listed Time Stand Still as one of those. Not a prototypical Rush song, actually as far from it that you could find...there's a female guest vocalist on it. To know Rush is to know that's not normal for them. In the interview he was saying that the song was somewhat autobiographical in his desire to essentially stop and smell the roses more and he said this:

I get frustrated when people say where did the time go. You just weren’t paying attention. 

A day is a day, a month is a month, a year is a year.

As time marches on I hear that sentiment a lot, hell, I've had that sentiment. Time seems to fly by quicker the older we get even though we know that a day is a day is a day. I suppose we could chalk it up to the fact that we are simply busy in our lives and everything seems to be moving at warp speed. The trees become stands and then forests and we lose site of individual trees in the blur of life going by...unless we manage to stop from time to time to see those trees.

The imagery and mystery around the passage of time is, of course, not a new one. It's been happening since the beginning of time after all, I think maybe what is different for the world at large is that everything is now, quite literally, at our fingertips. In a world as interconnected as we occupy now, we have all seen the same cat videos and Drumph memes the instant they hit the web. Obviously it wasn't always like that. When man first flew at Kitty Hawk it took weeks for the word to get around the world. When Armstrong walked on the moon it was a shared event that brought generations together in front of the black and white to witness history as it unfolded. When the Mars rover landed we could simply glance down at our phones to see what had just transpired and get back to whatever it was we were doing. The gravitas of the moment lost to expediency and the next thing that captures our attention.

Summer's going fast, nights growing colder

Children growing up, old friends growing older

Freeze this moment a little bit longer

Make each sensation a little bit stronger

Experience slips away

Experience slips away...

The innocence slips away

Personally I want to do better at being in the moment as much as possible...I want to experience all that life has to offer and as Neil had said,  to "know even better, to value the passing of time and the richness of experience.” It's interesting to me that I care less and less for the "stuff" in life and want to see and do more stuff. As some of you know personally, that direct experience I have with someone is much more important to me than having a bigger TV or cushions on my sofa. 

We can't stop time anymore than we can push on the ocean, all we can do is enjoy what we are doing with the time we have been given. Look around a little bit longer, make the sensation a little stronger.

Ciao

D