When times are good it is easy to be blissfully ignorant and casual about life and not tally the moments our daily joys string together like a garland of flowers. It is when things seem bleakest that time leaps at us in bold relief and each tick of the clock holds censure and menace. At those moments, the triumphs of life seem as remote as light seen from the bottom of a well, its impassable curve shooting upward toward an arctic pinprick of light, tauntingly hinting of illumination no longer attainable, of sun that will never again warm the chill of bones who understand the grief of living. Grace is easy when things are good, but perhaps the only moments of true grace and nobility are times that seem bleakest. Much of life is mundanaity punctuated by brilliant highs and stultifying lows. Maybe the trick is splitting the difference - limning our agonies and joys with the knowlege that most will balance out, and appreciating that giddy pleasures can only be fleeting. I fritter much of my time, but my mind is always working, shuttling the warp and weft of ideas and seeking patterns to explain all. The one assured pattern I have discovered is this: though we may crave the daylight, we would never see the stars if not for the blackness that night affords.

Time (Mason, Waters, Wright, Gilmour)
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say.

Breathe (reprise)
Home, home again. I like to be here when I can.
When I come home cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones beside the fire.
Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells.