For Wilshire Baptist Church
“If you could choose just one decade of music, what would you choose?” That was the question posed by some nameless, faceless person on Twitter meant to generate comments I suppose and perhaps drive some algorithm that benefits someone somewhere. I didn’t answer, but it definitely got me to thinking.
I bet a lot of us would choose the decade of our formative teenage years. For me that would be the 1970s, for better or worse. It was a time of converging and clashing music genres, and the radio stations were not so segmented that you didn’t get a good mix. In an hour’s time you’d hear rock, country, pop, disco. For me, the songs of that decade became the soundtrack of my life. It was the music I heard with my friends, the music we drove around to, the music we played in the marching band; it fueled my dopey crushes, my impossible dreams and my awkward angst. I still hear that music often because a lot of restaurants and public spaces play it. Sometimes I want to find the manager, who is probably younger than me, and ask: “Are you playing that because you like it too, or are you playing it because it will keep people from my generation coming in?”
I think we all can get stuck in time sometimes. Sometimes it’s easier to look backward and romanticize earlier days than it is to cope with today’s problems or even face a future that is uncertain. But the clock keeps ticking and the calendar keeps flipping and the earth keeps circling the sun. And like it or not, we have to keep moving with it. It’s one of those unbreakable laws of nature: You cannot stay in one place forever. The key then is to figure out how to move forward gracefully and with dignity and joy, and that’s a daily challenge.
One of the artists on my youthful soundtrack is James Taylor. His lyrics and melodies were first burned into my memory by my seventh-grade art teacher who was madly in love with him and played his records over and over again during class. To this day, when I hear some of those songs from 1972, I can still smell the paint and glue in that room. Taylor is 73 now, and it blows my mind to know he was only 11 years older than me when I was making a mess in that class. But I started listening to him more closely as I grew older, and today more than ever I find some truths in his music.
In “The Secret of Life,” Taylor expressed a simple philosophy that has only begun to resonate with me now: “The secret of life is enjoying the passing of time.” When I first heard that, I was a senior in high school and had no notion of the passing of time. Everything to know and enjoy was right then and there, so Taylor’s words fell on deaf ears. But I understand that philosophy now. What’s more, I’ve learned to embrace another line in that song: “Isn’t it a lovely ride? Sliding down, gliding down, try not to try too hard, it’s just a lovely ride.”
The remarkable thing is that Taylor was just 29 when he wrote those words. He was battling addiction and depression and yet something inside of him must have yearned for just letting life be and going along on the ride. No doubt the hard part for him then and really any of us now is recognizing the “lovely” in the day-to-day slog of life. That seems easier said than done – like closing your eyes while listening to an old song and trying to will your way back to what seemed like a simpler, happier time.
Maybe the real secret of life is to enjoy the passing of time in one-day increments – not pining for the past or reaching for the future but living fully in the one day that is ours: today. And perhaps a key to that is starting each day with this line from another song I grew up with:“This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”