Life Moves Pretty Fast

I'm at my desk, doing the work — invoices, emails, the back-office rhythm of the day. I'm a bit exhausted, honestly. We had the bakery blessing the previous evening, and I spent the night tossing and turning, probably from eating too much fatty party food. But exhausted or not, I'm here, and right now Cavatina is playing on YouTube.

Stanley Myers wrote it. Most people know it from The Deer Hunter, though the version that moves me is the one with two guitars and orchestra, the strings rising up underneath the guitar lines until the whole piece feels like it's breathing on its own. I stop. I literally stop. I keep my fingers on the keyboard, my eyes on the screen, but I'm not really there anymore. I'm somewhere the music is taking me.

I have tinnitus, so silence isn't really an option for me. There's always a ringing in my ears, and the only way to manage it is to put sound in the room. I've tried the obvious things — rain sounds, crickets, forest ambience — and they work, but only to a point. There's only so much rain a person can listen to. So I default to music. Not classical, exactly, and not pop. What I think of as Modern Classical Music. Film scores.

I prefer them because they're written to help an audience feel what a character is seeing. They're not background. They're a partner to the image. When you score your own day with music written for the screen, the day starts to feel like a scene you're actually inside of, instead of a list of things to get through.

And then sometimes a piece lands the way Cavatina lands, and the day stops being a scene at all. It just stops.

There's a line I've been carrying around since I was nineteen.

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Ferris Bueller said that, breaking the fourth wall at the end of the movie. Ferris Bueller's Day Off came out in the summer of 1986, a couple of months after I checked into my Reserve unit and got ready to start school in the fall at ARC. I was pretty gung ho about all of it — new unit, meeting the other Marines, school on the horizon. The line probably didn't land the way it lands now. At nineteen, you don't really hear life moves pretty fast. You're too busy moving with it.

The whole film is about a kid deciding to stop — to skip the day, to see the city, to eat the meal, to look at the painting. The Seurat scene is two and a half minutes of pure looking. Cameron stares into the painting and the camera zooms in tighter and tighter and the music slows down and the world holds still. He's not doing anything. He's just seeing. And the movie says: that's the point.

I've been collecting little reminders of this idea for months. Screenshots my sisters send me. TikToks I save. Articles I bookmark. Most of them are some version of the same message: live more meaningfully, slow down, pay attention, this is your life and it's happening now. I didn't realize until this morning that the answer was already in a movie I've loved for forty years.

The wisdom isn't new. I just couldn't hear it before the way I can hear it now.

Maybe that's what grief does. It strips a lot of the noise out of the room and leaves you with the things that were always true but you were too busy to notice. The Ferris line. The Cavatina swell. The light through the blinds. The cup of coffee that's gone cold while you weren't paying attention. The wife in the next room. The kids who are grown. The body that won't be young again. The work that will still be there in ten minutes.

I'm taking the break. Cavatina is still playing. I'm not going back to the invoices yet.