Breathe

Breathe, breathe in the air
Don’t be afraid to care
Leave but don’t leave me
Look around, choose your own ground

Pink Floyd, ladies and gentlemen. Roger Waters, a poet who can play the damn bass. David Gilmour, a fine guitarist who can write poetry with slides. Those two, of course, are barely on talking terms as far as I know. Classic rock and roll.

Creativity is a pretty elusive bitch. Few are very lucky to be able to capture it in the air. Few receive the epiphany while resonating with a select group of partners. Often, the story doesn’t end well but the legacy written has been ascribed permanently in the universe.

Pink Floyd was a creative product of the psychedelic early 70s and how damn well a job they did at capturing the elusive air of the era. Breathe, but don’t be afraid to care. Tell me, how difficult is that as we grow older? The times we’re living in now, we’re glorifying hectic schedules and material gains. Productivity is god. Scarcity is the devil that drives men and women into doing things that eventually eat their hearts out. We’re being compared and reviewed as numbers, not living, breathing entities.

It is as if they tell us that times are scant where we can breathe, while pretending as if there is no care in the world. Breathing is synonymous to escapism now, whether it be pubs, Netflix or both combined.

Pink Floyd grew up in the era of economic boom in the Western world accompanied with rapidly shifting values and beliefs. Survival might be harder now than then. They’ve got time to explore the other side and dwell in the search of who they really are in the universe.

Run, rabbit run
Dig that hole, forget the sun
And when at last the work is done
Don’t sit down, it’s time to dig another one

Aren’t most of us running on a treadmill now, forgetting what the sun truly looks like? Sheltered workplaces in the comfort of air conditioners. Tired eyes fueled by cafe and promises of fun weekends. Work is a form of conditioning and it never gets done. And what to dig anyway, if the “moral” thing to do is to climb, nothing but to climb.

For long you live and high you fly
And smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry
And all your touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be

Damn you, Mr. Roger Waters, you lucky soul. How could you write words like those? How refreshing it feels to read that we are not here just to be parts of a giant machine. We have been so obsessed with meanings and purposes, that we forget just to be. To see and to touch and to breathe, thus to live, more than just existing. A dear friend of mine tells me she often cries “for no reason” upon experiencing things. My girlfriends also likes to cry and perhaps often bemuses whether it’s a childish trait. Crying and smiling, they are not childish. They don’t have to have meanings to be acknowledged as living.

We are so used to defining experiences as behaviors, segmented into “reasonable” and “non-reasonable”. A “left-brained” society, whatever that means. We need goddamn complex machines to fly now. Soon, we will need more goddamn complex machines to feel simply alive too.

For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the biggest wave
You race towards an early grave

No Pink Floyd analysis would be complete without understanding the life of its eccentric founder, Syd Barrett, which I would not elaborate here. Feel free to google it. Syd’s life affected the other members so much, a pertinent reminder of the fickleness of sentience and mortality. No, Syd did not race towards an early grace; he raced towards an early “migration” to the other realm. Perhaps he did not manage to balance the tides coming to him. Or maybe, he found a way to let go, unlike the most of us.

I’m clueless as to whether I’m riding the tide or the tide being riding me, less so about balancing it. As to an early grave, let’s pray the hourglass be bigger and kinder. I love this messy game of existence so much that I can’t let go.

Such a beautiful obstinence, eh?

Look around, choose your own ground

I’m still looking around, not wanting to miss a thing, but I’m quite sure of the ground I’ve chosen for few years. This identity, this life, this quest. They may not have meanings as conventionally defined, but they could make me feel alive. It makes much more sense than running like a rabbit.

Choose your own ground

I have, haven’t I? Shit, that sounds kinda scary now. Sitting on a fence can give you a false sense of bliss, but still a bliss anyway.

Choose

Can I just not?

Breathe

That’s better.