Seasons

25 May 2025 - Blog Entry A few weeks back I was hanging out with my wife and neighbour and we were singing some very, how do you say, assisted karaoke late into the night/morning. We started off with songs from the 1950's and progressed through the decades. I am not very good at remembering names, song titles, and even artists, but I was able to conjure up a snippet of the song that Google was able to identify for me. The song was "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks. This is not a song I listen to often as it is a very emotional song for me. I remember being maybe eight years old and it would come on in restaurants or other places and it would always make me cry. Even to this day it brings a tear to my eye. The song is about a man who is dying for reasons not specified and he is saying goodbye to the people in his life. These goodbyes are mixed with a very uplifting chorus recalling the good times that they all had together. For some reason this resonated with eight year old me and still does to this day. I'm not so sure why younger me was so distressed by this song and I doubt I can even recall why (lots of dissociated episodes in my life). It's interesting to me because I don't think of this song often but I have always had a difficult time with being an entity that will simply cease one day. It's not that I fear death as that is something that makes little sense to me, however, it is the idea that we spend so much time constructing and curating this creature that we are for it all to come to a grinding halt. All of the past we do not know, the past we do know, the present we may or may not struggle with, and the future we have little insight into shape our thoughts and perspectives on life itself. We wander through our finite existence with much stress (acknowledge or ignored) that, for most humans, might as well be a mote of dust glimpsed for a second in the light cast by the setting sun. There and seen but only for a fraction of a fraction of a second and then forgotten. I'm not particularly concerned about being forgotten either as the number of people remembered through history is a very short list compared to the 120 billion or so who lived before us and the countless who will survive us. I think my eight year old hang-up with this song and its echoes on my life to this day has more to do with the barriers we build for ourselves and the fortresses that others build for us. As we move onward and the advances that we make to have an "easier" life afforded to us should make life easier for all, except right now that doesn't seem to be the case. We should all strive to be more understanding and considerate to others running the same marathon. "We had joy we had fun, we had seasons in the sun, but the stars we could reach were just starfish on the beach."