You know what it’s about?
It’s about time…
You know what it’s about?
It’s about loss…
You know what it’s about?
It’s about how resilient human beings can be…
It’s about time and loss
and how resilient human beings can be.
It’s about how things should have been
and how they turned out.
It’s about disappointments
and the mess that life has become.
It’s about the wasted hours
and the mistakes.
The words that just came out –
that were always going to come out.
It’s about the wasted years before the words came out.
It’s about finally telling the truth
and consequences of same.
It’s about the pain.
It’s about regretting and then later
not regretting the mistakes.
It’s about missing someone
when you’re in the supermarket
looking at the clothes section,
this poxy little clothes section
and you just see a stand with metal hooks
and some cheap clothes hanging off of it
and it reminds you –
it opens a door inside your brain,
the key is always something so simple
and it opens the locked room,
the room you’d sort of decided you wouldn’t go into for a while:
it opens that door and just gives you a quick peek.
It’s missing people who aren’t coming back.
It’s about carrying on without them
even though life seems a bit pointless now.
And it’s about the freedom of not caring
about things that don’t matter.
It’s about getting a new perspective.
It’s about dancing alone in the moonlight
to the song inside your head.
It’s about friends on the other side –
sensing them somewhere just behind you
where you can’t quite turn round far enough to see.
It’s about the fear that you’ll get to the end of your life and say
I wish I’d taken more risks,
I wish I’d had more sex,
I wish I’d made more mistakes.
It’s about holding out your hand to take the blows.
It’s about taking the tawse
and looking the teacher full in the eye.
It’s about being you with all your weaknesses and
still just about managing to look the bully in the eye.
It’s about being here, now
and giving yourself plenty of time for play
and not apologising.
It’s about having somewhere else to go
but staying on for a while.
It’s about getting the hell out
of the place where love is not
even when you have nowhere else to go.
It’s about not doing anything for a while,
waiting for a breeze
instead of using the oars.
It’s about William Blake and Joni Mitchell
and Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy.
It’s about Adlestrop and Elizabeth Bishop.
It’s about Philip Larkin and Rene Magritte
and Jackson Browne and Michael Leunig’s ducks.
And that one teacher, that one lover…
That one relative
who died before you were born.
It’s about being alone and not minding
because there are all these other lonely ones
you touch sometimes.
It’s about the place you go to walk and think,
the place where you touch the earth
and how you know that place and it shows itself to you
in animals and flowers and trees.
It’s about looking out for Jesus in every human situation
and when you don’t see him, thinking:
Okay, so now it’s my turn to be Jesus.
It’s about children
and parents
and guys who ride motorbikes into trees.
It’s about your friend who’s really an artist
your child who’s really an artist
your mother who’s really an artist
your father who’s really an artist.
It’s about weeping together,
working together, singing –
it’s really about singing.
It’s about letting the mystery be.
It’s about letting it sit there
and resisting the temptation to explain it away.
It’s about not needing to be right.
It’s about saying I don’t know what the hell it is about
but I find myself here and I think perhaps I chose to be here…
It’s about trusting what you cannot understand.
It’s about trying to understand the unlovable.
It’s about loving yourself and forgiving yourself
and making yourself smile.
It’s about laughing every day.
It’s about knowing when to shut up
and when to keep talking.
It’s about accepting reality
and realising you’ve made most of it up.
It’s about taking responsibility
and knowing how to let go.
It’s about YOUR Desert Island Discs.
It’s about you and me.
It’s about what YOU think it’s about.
It’s about time and loss
and how human human beings can be.
It’s about how they love a challenge.
It’s about time past and time left
and the tiny sliver in between the two
where we live.
It’s about time and loss.
It’s about time.