Joshua Minton’s Online Pulpit : The Stuff Life is Made Of and The Only Thing I Fear

The Stuff Life is Made Of and The Only Thing I Fear

Posted by Josh in June 19th, 2008

I’ve been aware of the time going by
they say in the end, it’s the wink of an eye
“The Pretender” by Jackson Browne

Just recently, I put a compilation CD together for my department at work. I asked everyone what the song was that they believed defined them as a person. 26 people. 26 different and unique songs to match equally distinct personalities. I told everyone it was a time capsule, something to be put in the back of a drawer and found five years from now, after everyone had either moved on, died, or rotted in the same desk chair–each of them victims of another five orbits of this blue marble around an average yellow nuclear furnace.

My song was The Pretender by Jackson Browne. I chose it because there is so much sadness and hope in it that in many ways it has become the defining song of my life as I’ve drifted from my late twenties into my early thirties. I fear few things in this world but time is at the top of that list. I fear wasting time more than anything.

Shit, my mother lost both of her parents to old age and illness by the time she was 27 years old. I’m now 33 which means that I’ve got to enjoy more parental time with my mother than she did. Time is a fucking killer, man.

Lately, I’ve found myself drifting into my son’s room before I cash it in for the night and I stand in the dim glow of his fake fish aquarium nightlight, watching him sleep in his footie pajamas and I fret about the times I was too busy working to play with him when he all he wanted was five minutes of my attention. I’ve just let that shit slip away into obscurity. That’s the important shit but I can never seem to remember that at the time. It’s only when I get drunk and sloppy or find a moment of solitude when I can remove all the filters we each have to put up to avoid madness as we slide through the cogs of somehow choking this world down until we swallow.

Wasted Time–that was another woman’s song–you know that Eagles one. She’s a divorcee with two children, working on her third post-matrimonial long-term relationship.

Time is a fucking killer. John Wilkes had it right. Don’t squander time. It’s the stuff life’s made of.
photo credit: permanently scatterbrained