“How are you?” You’ve asked others the question, and I would expect you have been asked (I hope you have) how you are. Generally speaking, it is a standard greeting as much as “hi”. Responses tend to be auto scripted as well. “Fine”. “Great”. Blah, blah, blah.

Life cruises along, the seconds, minutes, hours and days merge together and add up to a life. A life spent. Invested or squandered. Some of us have done both. The days of my youth seemed to stretch on endlessly. Summer vacation offered time to play outdoors, bike riding, building forts and park and rec. I don’t recall feeling as if I didn’t have enough time to go around. The pace wasn’t frantic. Sitting cross-legged in the backyard with a friend talking about nothing and everything. Simply being.

Life goes on and adulthood brings responsibility without the freedom “to do whatever I want”. Most children assume adulthood brings money and the power to choose whatever one's heart desires. Once into adulting, most of us accept the reality that our time isn’t truly ours! The clock and calendar, jobs and mortgages, and family responsibilities take front and center. A song from my old life immediately comes to mind.

Pink Floyd Time

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown

Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain

And 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

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again

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

The song is over. Released in 1973, I was kicking around on a piece of ground in my hometown. Had someone had asked me how my day was, back then, my response would not have been something I would put in print today. I was not considering how I was spending precious time.

I think one of the reasons is the responses to “How are you?” or “How was your day?” are so generic because we don’t consider how we truly are or how our day actually was. Getting caught up in cultural spins, our own head noise (my definition of unchecked thoughts) and unrealistic expectations, we don’t really think. A series of auto responses, too much caffeine and habitual running prohibits us from honest evaluation.

If you have read this far, you most likely think things through regularly. Short attention span is a growing problem and this blog is not short. So, if you are a thinker, I’d like to know, “How was your day?”. Please leave a comment below!