“Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am seventy-five and yet not ever truly to have lived.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.
I watched James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke with Paul McCartney. They were in Liverpool driving by all the places that were important to Paul in his youth. The most touching part for me was when Paul told the story of his deceased mother coming to him in a dream in the 60’s reassuring him that everything was going to be ok, just let it be. Then Paul and James sang Let It Be and both of them, and me were teary. There’s something so touching about the passage of time told through the lyrics of the music we loved in our youth and continue to love. “There will be an answer, let it be…”
If only comedian Sean Morey’s Reverse Life Cycle, a piece first performed on the Tonight Show in 1980, could be true…
“I think the most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work for forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement! You go to college, you do drugs, alcohol, you party, you have sex, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating….you finish off as a gleam in somebody’s eye.”
