Time

I am starting this blog off by liberally nicking this snippet of a lyric from Pink Floyd’s superb 1970s track, ‘Time’:

“And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you.

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

So 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….’

Now, when I first heard that song, the lyrics barely registered as profound. I just loved the track taken from the album Dark Side of the Moon, released when I was a toddler; an album I discovered in my late teens and became my sound track to life as I blossomed into a young adult, through university into being a grown-up; an album that I played when I was living in a trendy part of town in my early thirties; an album I listened to in the car when I was driving my toddlers back and forth to various play dates; the album that I still play now as a frazzled fifty- something when I want to re-capture the heady days of youth and feel like a good old cry.

I do remember thinking at the time that ten years was forever. In that naivety of adolescence, when summer holidays stretched ahead like sunny sandy empty beaches and time stayed in one place, ten years was a lifetime. Days were spent reading, listening to music, getting deliciously bored, a time where procrastination was actively encouraged, and the to-do list didn’t exist. I remember being seventeen and life was just one long lie in, punctuated with a bit of sixth form college and drinking cider. And then, as the song says, one day you find, ten years have got behind you and you suddenly have responsibility with all the baggage that entails, and the reality of life is staring you straight between your eyes.

I feel seventeen, yet in a finger click I am in my fifties. I feel as if someone put me into a time machine and it spat me out a year or so ago unprepared for adulthood. I don’t feel I have actually grown up yet and certainly I cannot get my head around I am nearer seventy years old than thirty. Again, referring to the poignant lyrics above, I feel I missed the starting gun. My life is speeding forward at an alarming speed, birthdays breeze by, summers merge into winters and intermingle with summer again. I am shocked when yet again the daffodils are up, and every year vow to plant different winter bulbs - to find that it is March already and the yellow flowers are nodding in sullen silence acknowledging that I missed the boat yet again. Perhaps next year. My children get older and taller and they talk of their own childhood memories as if they were seasoned adults reminiscing years gone by. Other people’s children are adults and having babies of their own. When I danced around with innocent frivolity in the 1990s to Jarvis Cocker singing the lyrics ‘let’s all meet up in the year 2000’ in Pulp’s iconic song; or to Prince wanting to ‘party like it’s 1999’ – life extended miles ahead – I had more to do than I had done. Now it is with horror I realise that the futuristic sounding year 2000 was twenty fucking years ago..

I have a bucket list which is getting longer, yet time is running out. How am I going to fit everything in? I thought by now I would have travelled more, learnt more, lived more. Places I have yet to go to, journeys I have yet to take, experiences I haven’t yet had. I look back at my misspent youth, envious of all the time I had back then. The old adage that youth is wasted on the young is never a truer statement. I wish I could grab the youthful me, shake her and tell her to get up, hear the birds, swim in the rivers, climb the mountains, kiss strangers, jump on trains to unknown destinations, read more literature, write a book and save a penny or two. But if I had appeared like one of Dickens’ ghost in front of me then, and bellowed to just get on with it – would I have listened?

My life feels I am on a roundabout, dizzily spinning too quickly for comfort. I want to stop it, get off, sort out some of the to-do lists that dominate my daily life, and only hop on again when I have caught up. I fear I will never get everything done, that if I shuffle off this mortal coil sooner than I wish, my life will be typified by the state of my desk – an unsatisfied mountain of filing, unfinished tasks and a pile of travel and lifestyle magazines with faded post-it notes marking unfulfilled dreams.

I know the grass isn’t greener, that the past is only viewed through rose-tinted specs, and that time plays the same old tricks on all of us. I am sure if I had visited the youthful me, I would have been rather cross with the interfering adult – why would I have wanted to change? I was having some of the best laughs with some of the best friends I would ever meet, enjoying the pure, exquisite laziness of youth; falling in love with people who more than thirty years Iater, I can still count on as dear to me, including my husband, a true soul mate. Am I just putting a sensible middle-aged spin on what I think I should have done? Would I really have chosen visiting an art show when I was seventeen over drinking cider with friends in the park? Or learnt Russian at evening class in my spare time rather than listen to a mate’s band in a pub? My sons roll their eyes if we ask them to even think about joining us for a concert, or a night at the theatre, preferring, instead, to spend time with their friends learning lessons of life – in their minds, plenty of time ahead for cultural experiences.

Of course, time isn’t speeding up – just our concept of time is. The daily routine of life, week in, week out, is filled in by the brain – it has been there before, so it fills in the blanks. That is why a journey to somewhere new seems to take longer than the journey home – the new experience is savoured by the brain in detail whereas on the return the brain jumps to the next reference point. Getting anxious about disappearing time is not going to help me, in fact my brain is just hitting autopilot as I run through all the things I didn’t do in the past, instead of trying to teach it some new tricks. The fear of not having time to fit everything in should in theory catapult me to experiences new, however, the opposite is often true, and I spend more wasted energy mourning a misspent youth that I actually loved. Why can’t I learn that the experiences I had, and indeed those I did not, have made me who I am. For better or worse, I will never know if I would be a better person if I had taken myself off with a backpack when I was twenty-two or if I had started my career earlier rather than go to university. The anxious mind is never satisfied – always trying to dot the ‘i’ and cross the ‘t’, always searching, forever saying 'what if', repeatedly looking to fix something that isn’t broke. Time now, I think, oh anxious mind, to move on.

© The Real Tilly Fairfax