Time Stand Still
On the Unbearable Tightness of Being
A man spends years hunting sinners.
Not criminals. Sinners.
He believes society has lost its moral compass. Everywhere he looks he sees evidence of decay.
Greed. Lust. Gluttony.
Sloth. Pride. Envy.
Wrath.
Over time, his certainty hardens into something darker. He no longer sees human beings.
Only categories.
The righteous and the fallen. The pure and the impure. The saved and the damned.
Eventually he decides someone must do something about it.
What follows is a series of horrific murders designed to punish those he believes embody the Seven Deadly Sins.
The killer’s name is John Doe, and thankfully, he’s not real.
He’s a fictitious villain from the movie Seven.
The first time I watched Seven, I thought it was about evil.
Today, I think it’s more a cautionary tale about certainty.
John Doe isn’t destroyed by sin. He’s destroyed by rigidity.
By his belief that he can somehow stand outside the human condition, judging others.
His judgmental beliefs are just a lens he mistakes for reality. In the end, reality catches up with him, inevitably, his lens forces his hand at his own expense.
Don’t worry, I wasn’t thinking about John Doe because I identify with him. But I can appreciate what the movie never wants us to forget. The danger of holding on to our beliefs too tightly.
I’ve spent my whole life honing my beliefs. Searching for the correct lenses to see the world through.
Romantic. Spiritual. Political. Moral.
The correct recovery program. Correct therapeutic model. Correct philosophy of life.
And the suffering I’ve experienced clinging to any one lens till my knuckles got white.
Jon Doe’s lens caused his suffering and his demise. These days, I’m less convinced suffering comes from choosing the wrong lens.
I wonder more if suffering simply comes from holding any lens too tightly.
For years I bounced between two extremes.
The first is what is sometimes called the YOLO lens.
You only live once. This life is all there is.
No second chances. No cosmic meaning. No spiritual safety net.
Just a brief flicker of consciousness, then lights out. End of story.
There is something beautiful about this perspective.
It reminds us to engage.
To take that trip. Write the song. To tell an uncomfortable truth to someone who matters to you. To call your mother, for God’s sake. And by all means, to stop putting off your life.
But YOLO has a shadow side.
If this life is really all there is, then every disappointment becomes enormous.
Every missed opportunity feels permanent and every unrealized dream lands like a verdict.
Before too long, not “winning” starts to feel like not existing.
So I needed a backup lens.
What Ram Dass sometimes referred to as the Earth Suit perspective.
Our earth suit is like a car and our eternal soul, the driver.
We’re all just perennial travelers. A spirit temporarily inhabiting a body in the material world.
Under this view, success and failure kind of fall apart conceptually. Not because they don’t matter.
Because they aren’t ultimate reality. Just brief stops along the way.
A failed marriage becomes a relationship experiment.
An unfinished novel turns into something to do for fun on days off.
The “unrealized” career transforms into a sometimes mundane, sometimes interesting journey with no particular destination. More chapters than final judgments.
The Earth Suit lens can offer quite a comforting perspective. But it has dangers too.
Held too tightly, it can become another form of avoidance. Sometimes referred to as the withdrawal solution. Another strategy to talk ourselves out of wanting things that really matter to us. Another way of pretending loss doesn’t hurt.
I know this because I’ve done it. In really big ways and lesser ones too.
In 2012 I was on tour in Canada.
One afternoon our drum tech showed up to soundcheck beaming.
On the previous night off he’d gone to see Rush, and I was unexpectedly devastated.
Not because we were close. He hadn’t done anything wrong. I just realized in that moment how badly I wanted to go and wished he’d invited me. Years later I realized I wasn’t even angry at him. I was angry at myself. It touched a part of me I often exile.
The part that wants things. The part that gets excited. The part that says, yes!
Call it my “Yes” Part. And my Yes part does not automatically run every desire through a cost-benefit analysis.
I have a parent part for that. A kind of “NO” part that quickly arrives and says:
“Now, now. We don’t really need to do that.”
I’ve spent most of my life as the ref between those voices. In Freudian terms, from the seat of my ego, watching my Id and Superego do this yes/no dance.
Id says: You only live once.
Superego says: You don’t really need it.
Id says: Buy the ticket!
Superego says: No. It’s way too expensive.
A few months ago, when tickets for Rush’s long-awaited return went on sale, I automatically told myself I wasn’t going.
My No part was clear. Too expensive and not necessary. Neil Peart’s not there. Arguably, it’s not even Rush.
My No part often works with my Lawyer part to provide a sound case for depriving myself of things my Yes part wants.
You’re not a kid anymore. Make the responsible choice.
But when the weekend arrived, videos starting appearing online. Friends posted photos.
The excitement reached a fever pitch and suddenly I found myself sitting in my living room, twenty minutes from the Forum with a burning desire to be there.
Then I watched a video of my old boss, Aimee Mann, performing on night one with the band. My mind drifted back to 1985. The first time I watched her on MTV when I was a teenager. First with Til Tuesday, then guesting with Rush in 1987 on the song “Time Stand Still”.
I was captivated by the music.
By her and Rush and the possibility that maybe… I could do that one day.
About twenty years later I’d find myself playing guitar in her band, post-show, riding on a tour bus through Europe as she told me the story about how her unlikely participation with Rush came to be.
Fast forward another twenty years or so. It’s 2026, and I’m sitting in my living room, debating whether or not to buy a ticket to the Rush show because they meant something to me, forty years ago.
As I watched the video of Aimee singing with the band at the Forum, I began to cry.
Not because it was Rush or because it was Aimee. Not even because I wanted to go to the concert.
I cried because I suddenly realized what was actually happening.
Life, is an experience. And suddenly, in that moment, I could feel it slipping away.
When I was younger, mortality existed mostly as an idea. Something that happened to older people. Something waiting somewhere far, far, over the horizon.
Today it feels different. I don’t think about death so much. I think about time.
I notice the speed of things. The years. The seasons.
The way my children seem to change overnight.
The way old friends now casually discuss surgeries and retirements. The way we all look like people we once made fun of way back when.
The way certain musicians and actors, once seemingly so mighty and immortal, are now gone.
At some point in midlife, time stops being theoretical. You begin to experience it more directly.
What overwhelmed me that afternoon wasn’t the possibility of missing a concert.
It was the realization that part of me hoped buying a ticket could somehow stop the clock briefly.
As if maybe, for a few hours, I could hold onto something. Freeze an experience, or at least, stop it from whizzing by. Make it stay long enough to really taste it.
Six years prior, I experienced something similar.
I was working in my studio in Venice while Neil Peart was dying in a hospital in Santa Monica ten minutes away.
The same hospital my kids were born in. The same hospital across the street from the Jewish delis I went to when their mom was told the baby wasn’t ready to come out and I went to get her something to eat that wasn’t hospital food. The same place where my life changed forever the moment my children came into the world and I watched them take their first breaths.
The births and death of people that meant the world to me, occupying the same building.
Same hallways, same rooms.
I was feeling something difficult to describe. Not grief exactly. Grief hadn’t quite pulled into the station, but it was around the corner.
In that moment, I felt the awareness that something very precious was disappearing while it was still here.
Neil wasn’t just a drummer or philosopher or lyricist or poet. For me and so many others, he was part of the soundtrack of our lives.
Certainly part of my adolescence and development as a musician. Part of the thread connecting the boy I once was to the man I’d become.
I wasn’t mourning the loss of a celebrity. And I doubt he ever saw himself that way.
I was mourning the passage of time itself. The inevitability of it. The realization that every chapter eventually becomes a memory.
That’s when I began to understand something.
My suffering wasn’t coming from wanting too much or being insufficiently spiritual. It wasn’t coming from not having chosen the right philosophy.
I was grieving impermanence. Suffering from trying to negotiate with it. Trying to somehow convince reality to make an exception for the people and things I love. Hoping to pause moments that were never designed to be paused.
For years I’ve been bouncing between YOLO and Earth Suit.
Ambition and acceptance.
Self-improvement and surrender.
Achievement and recovery.
Attachment and detachment.
I’ve clung tightly to myriad lenses at different times.
Each offered relief in their own way, until each one eventually became a trap.
YOLO reminds me life is precious and fleeting.
Earth Suit reminds me that human life is temporary but something deeper inside us may endure.
Ambition reminds me that effort matters. Recovery’s there to show me I’m powerless over all people, places, and things.
Activism never lets me forget that injustice is real. That I have a responsibility to do something about it, while acceptance brings me back to the truth; I simply cannot control everything.
These are all useful lenses.
The trouble begins when I mistake any one lens for reality itself. Like a garment worn too tightly.
John Doe wore his beliefs too tightly.
The addicts I work with often wear their shame too tightly. Political tribes wear their certainty too tightly. Religious fundamentalists wear their doctrines too tightly.
I’ve worn spirituality too tightly. Achievement and self-denial too.
The older I get, the more I return to what Buddhists call the middle path. 12-step sometimes refers to it as being on the beam.
Not because it solves the problem.
Because it creates room.
Room for desire and disappointment.
For ambition and surrender.
For uncertainty. For being human.
I think of the younger men I sometimes work with who struggle with addiction. Twenty-five years ago, when they relapsed, I saw failure, same as when I had a slip.
Today it looks different.
More and more I see human beings learning how to return.
How to return after shame, disappointment, self-betrayal.
How to return after another lost battle.
The goal is no longer perfection. It’s shortening the distance between falling down and getting back up.
Is that growth? Yeah. I think so.
Not becoming a completely different person or transcending our humanity. Not reaching some permanent state of enlightenment. Good luck with that.
The growth is just becoming a little more capable of returning.
And with each return, we’re a little more honest, a little less defended.
A little more compassionate, a little more awake.
The creator of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, once suggested that people change a little, not a lot.
When I was younger, I found that idea depressing. My younger self wanted BIG change, and often felt gutted when that didn’t happen.
Today I find it comforting. This idea that perhaps we’re not here to become entirely different people. Maybe just slightly better versions of ourselves.
Five percent kinder. Five percent braver. Five percent less self-centered.
Five percent more able to tolerate uncertainty and still love the people standing right in front of us.
I know that doesn’t sound like much. But don’t underestimate compound interest.
Five percent, accumulated over a lifetime, is actually massive.
Lately I’ve begun to suspect that wisdom has less to do with finding the correct philosophy and more to do with loosening our grip on the ones we already use.
Wear your beliefs like a loose garment.
Let them keep you warm and guide you. But make sure to leave enough room to breathe.
Enough room for contradiction. For both mystery and reality.
The A.A. Big Book says that suffering comes when we try to run the whole show.
When we try to manage not just our own lives, but the lives of our partners, friends, and co-workers. Not to mention the future of ourselves, everyone else, of the country and the world. Basically, when we try to do the job that belongs to some Power far greater than us.
I think there’s truth in that. After all, I can’t literally stop time. No human can.
Much suffering has come from trying to freeze what was never designed to be frozen.
Trying to possess what was only ever meant to be experienced. Oh God, how I wish that were different. If I could’ve possessed the ones I love. Kept them exactly as I wanted them in the moments they pleased me most. Or stopped from changing that which was always going to change.
Life, love, station.
In the end, I ponied up and bought two pricey Rush tickets. No guest list this time.
Was I going to try and stop time or just give myself a nice experience? I wasn’t entirely sure. I called up a music buddy and asked if he was going. He was on the fence for the same reasons. I told him I had an extra ticket. He offered to buy it and go with me.
I drove to the Forum that night feeling excited. We met in the parking lot and headed towards the venue. On our way, we started to reminisce about the rock shows we saw in our youth. We laughed about the old days. Before too long, I’d forgotten all about my so-called troubles.
As we took our seats, I saw some dear old friends a few rows down. We smiled and laughed. Not a care in the world.
And when the lights dimmed and the crowd started to cheer, I knew exactly where I was.
I was home.
The band was phenomenal.
The crowd ecstatic.
For three hours I didn’t worry about mortality, politics, philosophy, or whether I was holding the right worldview. I admired Anika’s groove and loving attention to musical detail. I slipped down the slide of Geddy’s snarling bass tone. I bathed in the shimmery harmonies Alex coaxed from his Les Paul, both crystalline and menacing. I rode the sine waves of vocal melodies so elastic, I might as well have been bouncing on a trampoline.
And above all, I listened with great interest, as the words of a sage, both timeless and timely, permeated the arena. And I realized:
I wasn’t trying to pause life.
I was happy to just be a part of it.
I loved myself and everyone else there a little more than usual.
And when the last note faded and the band took their bows, the lights came up.
My buddy and I walked to the parking lot.
The night was over. As it was always going to be.
The experience slipped away.
And that is precisely what made it worth having.
Life keeps moving.
Children will grow up. Old friends will grow older.
The heroes of our youth disappear eventually.
Seasons turn and experience slips away.
Always has. Always will.
The miracle isn’t that we can stop it. No one can.
The miracle is that we all get to participate in it. In all of it.
These days I’m less interested in stopping time.
Less interested in winning or being certain or being right.
Today I’m more interested in looking around.
Paying attention. Showing up.
Participating in the strange, beautiful experience of being alive. Somehow both long and difficult and short and sweet.
One challenge after another. One season after another.
And no longer wearing the experience of being an imperfect human too tightly. Leaving room to switch lenses.
Leaving room for not knowing. For wonder and surrender. Learning to suspend everything I think I know when I feel troubled. To open my mind to some new possibility I never even considered.
Arms out, feet on the beam.
Not too hot, not too cold.
Right in the middle.
And today, that’s good enough.
Is that good enough for you? Do you fare better following more strict beliefs or leaving some room for other ways of seeing things?
Let me know!
And as always, if you enjoy what’s happening here each week, I’d love for you to claim your seat at the table as a subscriber.
I always say if it brings you joy do it. Buy the tickets and enjoy the show. Lights come back on at the end of the show whether you’re there or not. The videos show up on social media but there is nothing like being physically there. Glad you had a great time at the show…in the end, I am so sure you were glad to be there, you showed up for all the parts of you that needed the music, lights etc. ✨🥰🎶
SO much said there. My feeling is we share DNA you and I! Not certain if that is biology or biography because we think uncannily alike. Too much for simple biography methinks.
It takes a lot to stay present and unattached in the same moment aint it? As the jazz musician in me says: eternity is a motherfucker!