The Vanity of Time

“And you are young and life is long

And there is time to kill today.

But then one day you find,

Ten years have got behind you –

No one told you when to run,

You missed the starting gun.”

 - Pink Floyd, Time

            When I first heard Dark side of The Moon, I was a little underwhelmed. People had always said it was one of the great albums – the experience it created was life changing. At the time it sounded good, but life changing was a bit of stretch, especially at the age of seventeen when life was just beginning.

            I’ve aged some, and find myself coming back to it more and more, its wisdom a little more concrete now that I’ve had the experience to understand it. Dark Side of The Moon is about life itself, from birth to death and everything in between. But the chief aspect of life Dark Side addresses is the thing that ties all this together: time.

            Time is something we know well yet we don’t know at all. We use it to plan meetings, decide how to organize our day. Beyond this, though, what function does time really serve?

            For me, time is a reminder. It’s the only thing that you don’t want allotted in large amounts, for the more of it you’ve spent, the less of it there is to use. I mean, if I had all the time in the world, why do anything? Why try to become a writer now when I could very well do it twenty, thirty years later? If I miss an appointment, I can make another one. But where’s the fun in that?

            The biggest reminder time gives us is our closeness to death. This has given me comfort and disdain, for death reminds us that nothing lasts forever. Love, money and friends all have an expiration date. That doesn’t mean only good things aren’t born to last. Poverty doesn’t last forever, neither does an unfair mortgage, or credit card bills. Any normalcy we have in our lives might be absent at any given moment, and the same goes for any hardship. If everything lasted forever, no one would take a loan, or default on their credit. That’s a long time to go without buying a television.

            But then you may say, “if everything is born to die, why take up anything?” Look at those hair metal bands from the eighties. Two to three years is plenty of time to snort enough coke off groupies to keep you satisfied for life – but there’s always more coke and more groupies, and we can’t help but want more of that. It’s human nature to amass things, including life itself.

            Ask yourself when the last time you appreciated taking a breath of air was. It’s easy to take it for granted. It’s always there, it will always be there, and as long as we have it, we can live and flourish and snort as much coke off as many groupies as we want. What if air was finite? If you knew, how would your day be different?

There’s a reason for this: any thing that has a set amount makes it valuable. When you realize how much time you have left, you begin to realize the crime of wasting it. Unlike air, time is something that is permanently gone. You’re only young once can similarly be said about being old. In the grand scheme of things, time makes every day valuable. Lest we forget, a day only happens once, and it should be something you’ll always want to remember.