Some songs just feel like a good friend. They tell you what you need to hear when you need it, whether you wanna hear it or not. It might help that the piano runs are absolutely iconic, but I feel it’s the precise way it calls out my bullshit that has made this 70’s classic one of my all-time favourites.

I couldn’t count the times that my shuffle randomly blessed me with this gem & forced a deep breath & recalibration - it usually changes the trajectory of my whole day. That's why today, I’m taking it back to 12th grade with an old-fashioned breakdown of my most impactful lines. What's so special about this song & its lyrics? Well, let’s dive right in with the opening line:

Slow down, you crazy child
You're so ambitious for a juvenile

To me, this sets the stage for the theme of the song perfectly: This youthful haste, the stressful urgency of those that have recently discovered they’re now the ones setting life’s pace.

All throughout school, the pace is pretty set: If you take one year to complete a school year, that’s pretty good. Some skip a year, some take longer - but at least in my experience, there wasn’t this constantly lingering urgency to finish the school year a bit faster. When it’s time for math class, it’s time for math class - when it’s time for an exam, it’s time for an exam. Not to say school can’t be stressful for a myriad reasons, but at least I never felt like I was too slow because I hadn’t completed February’s exams in December.

So all is sorta well on the pace side - and then you graduate. In the song, we hear Joel's father is speaking to a young, impatient Billy trying to make it as a songwriter. But the same is true for the 23y/o trying climb the corporate ladder or the uni student scrambling to get all possible extracurriculars and then some. They all recognise that there’s now basically no limit on their progress. That they don’t have to wait a year to move to the next level (whatever that means in your context). But that also means it could take two years while everyone else is doing it in one - God forbid they could "fall behind in life”.

So your 20s are the time to grind, to “get ahead”. But obviously you’re also expected to “live life” in your 20s - See the world, spend those late nights with friends that will move to another city soon & do all that good stuff young people do.

In the midst of all this, we’re basically just kids that sometimes pay their bills on time. So it's no wonder that in this convoluted mess of expectation and orientation, it feels like the only way to keep up with life is to speed up - and even that never seems enough.

It’s a false thought to young minds:
Irony of being in your 20s and feeling like you’re running out of time

But it doesn't have to be that way. Just because we feel like we're running out of time, doesn't mean we actually are. We might just have developed tunnel vision. In my piece on my struggles with Being, I wrote:

When you’re running, everything along the way becomes blurry. Focused on the finish line, you wonder if maybe you can go a little bit faster - but rarely why you’re even running.

So what to do in this dire situation? Well, aren't we in luck that we have a class fella like Billy in our ears coming to the rescue. If there's one thing that's unbeatable at dispelling illusions, it's a good question. So try this one:

Where's the fire, what's the hurry about?
You'd better cool it off before you burn it out.

This question, to me, is the antidote. To stop and wonder: Where’s that urgent emergency? What am I running from - or towards? The simple act of looking for the fire and failing to find it is a foolproof way to snap me out of my mindless sprint. Once you slow down - even just for a moment - two things become apparent:

1

Far too often, we forget the solid probability that we're living in the good 'ol days. That one day, we’ll look back at this very season of life where things were so open and uncertain, nothing was set in stone and we had no idea what’s going on - and we’ll see a beautiful time of exploration & adventure. We’ll wonder what the hurry was about, why we never recognised the beauty in it.

To stay with the analogy, once you realise you’re not running from a fire, you get to slow down just a little bit. And what do you see when you dare to turn your head a little bit? Surprise: It’s not a burning inferno to be escaped, it’s a bunch of flowers & a lovely lake. You’re not running from a fire, you’re running from the good ‘ol days - and at this pace, you might very well miss them.

2

Somewhere in the recognition that we can now set the pace of our own life’s progression lies this nagging voice: “How fast can you go?”. Ask any student with 6 hours left on the deadline and you’ll find that the answer is “so much faster than you could ever imagine”. Our potential to sprint is truly impressive.

But in a cruel turn of events, most things truly valuable in this life aren’t within sprinting distance. So what happens when you try to sprint a whole triathlon? Well, in the words of our friend Billy in the very next line:

You're gonna kick off before you even get halfway through

I’m not just speaking from personal experience when I say that Burnout in your 20s is a very real possibility. And there’s no quicker way to hating what you do than to burn out doing it. So in the absence of a fire, it’s worth resting for a moment to consider: “Do I care enough to stay in it for the long run?”. If you do, you can return to that nagging voice and kindly propose a tiny amendment to its favourite question: “How fast can you go sustainably?”

What’s even more beautiful once you recognise that you’re playing the long game: A singular missed step might ruin a sprint, but is inevitable in the context of your personal triathlon. Take it from Billy again:

It's all right, you can afford to lose a day or two,
When will you realize Vienna waits for you?

This simple reminder really works like a balm on my soul. This week, for example, I missed a step. I slept a whole 2hrs on Wednesday and, to no one’s surprise, spent Thursday in a fully delirious state and Friday operating at a solid 30%. I lost a day or two. And you know what? Here I sit, still alive and in one piece.

If I imagine a fire and convince myself of the narrative of a sprint, losing a day or two is an irreversible catastrophe. But from the perspective of the long game, I can’t help but smirk at the thought of my 2033-self upset that I didn’t sleep enough that one day in October 2023. So why should my 2023-self be upset?

Well, my 2023-self is probably still convinced that this gruesome loss of days is pointing to a bigger issue. An issue central to his being, an inherent inadequacy in the life he leads and the things he does. After all, he missed his potential. So, in that case, my 2023-self better shut up and listen to Billy one more time:

Slow down, you're doin' fine
You can't be everything you wanna be before your time

To me, this is the essence. The central affirmation that you, at what stage of your journey you might be, are doing fine.

That you don’t have do be anywhere else right now.
That you don’t have to be anyone else right now.
That this - that whole funky life you've built for yourself- is deeply and inherently okay. As is the one living it.

You might not have figured it out - no one said you’re doing exquisitely amazing (even though that might be the case, Billy just didn't know). But for someone that’s recently been thrown into this infinite, vast ocean of possibility without any instruction manuals - not for yourself and not for the world - you are doing just fine.

Sit with this. Take a deep breath in and feel it. You're okay. If you feel a little bit of stress off your shoulders, that’s a pretty good sign that you’d been assuming the opposite. These underlying assumptions of our perception so often fade into the background and become nothing but an unnoticeable undertone. If you've ever been in a kitchen when the fridge stopped whirring, you know what I mean. The relief of a stress you never knew you felt - just a little more existential than the fridge.

Bonus

As you can probably tell, the passages above all play into the same idea. But there are some more little nuggets of gold in here that I didn't wanna skip. So, here they are:

Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true,
When will you realize Vienna waits for you?

I love the idea of goals & ambitions as a North Star: They provide direction. They help you learn what’s important to you. They help you navigate this infinitely complex world in a congruent & consistent way instead of randomly shifting your trajectory once a week and going in circles forever. But, and this is an important but, you never assume to arrive there. You might aim for the North Star, but you’d be foolish to get frustrated when you land in Fiji instead of the northern circumpolar constellation of Ursa Minor (where the North Star is located).

A mantra I’ve been living by for a while is this wonderful quote from Oliver Burkeman: “A plan is just a statement of present intention.” It's still valuable for clarity's sake, but it removes this assumption that a plan could somehow be a way to grab a specific future and pull it over here.

This is the same feeling I get from this wonderful line. You’re free to dream, but you’re equally free to save yourself the despair of assuming that it’ll come exactly the way you dreamt.

Slow down, you crazy child
And take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while

This is where you’re reminded the song is from 1977. I had to look this one up myself, but: On old rotary phones, if you took the phone off its hook, you started the dialling process - meaning your line was busy and no calls can reach you. It was the original flight mode.

Now, I’ll spare you the 729th list of the proven sleep, stress & mental health benefits that come from time offline. I’ll just say this: Our pal Billy didn’t even have iMessage, Instagram or E-Mail push notifications. Silly guy couldn’t even take his phone with him anywhere. All he had was this chunky black piece of plastic that did nothing but ring when someone else turned a dial. But even that became too much at times. So if you’re looking for a little bit of peace, it might be closer than you think.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve returned to the habit of not touching my phone for the first two hours of the day. Do you know how weird it felt to leave the house and go for a walk without a phone & headphones? But the good kind of weird - this odd, new open space for the mind to wander. Instead of boredom, you get reacclimatised to the incredibly vivid experience of something as mundane as a walk. But I digress. Billy knew 50 years ago that constant connectivity is stressful. And you know it today.