This week began with my youngest son Dylan playing his last soccer game for the club he started playing at when he was four-years old, and then my middle son, Chase, turned fourteen years-old and graduated from eight grade, and then my oldest, Haley, endured her first ever 40-hour work week, and then inside an old copybook I found a picture of my eighth grade baseball team aligned in two rows, the first kneeling in the green grass, the second standing behind the first row with their hands behind their backs, both rows smiling and squinting in the 1994 June sun as it set behind the photographer and then my dad saw the dusty picture sitting on the kitchen table, picked it up, smiled, and hummed Glory Days and then the week ended with my grandmother’s funeral.

Glory Days is the 10th track off of Bruce Springsteen’s album “Born in the USA.” Selling more than 30 million copies worldwide, the 1984 album would be Springsteen’s most commercially successful album to date.

Yes, I’m a huge Bruce fan/nerd however Glory Days has never been a favorite track 

To me, it seemed a bit of contrived nostalgia. Overwrought. Tiresome. Like a high school reunion that lasted an hour too long. However, this week this song became an obsession. I listened to the original version, live versions, acoustic covers, and bad karaoke versions.

And you know something, the more I listened to the song, the less I liked it. 

Yet the more I listened to it the more I understood why it remains one of his most popular songs. So much of Bruce’s songs are set to pounding drums and catchy guitar riffs that often lay a distraction for the gritty, truthful lyrics lurking below. Life–with its 40-hour work weeks– often distracts us from the truth that time is passing in “a wink of a young girl’s eye” and soon leaves us with “boring stories of glory days.”

Several times this week Cindy and I whispered to each other – both in words and in glances – “we’re getting old.” It’s a painful realization. One that we often try to deny or distract ourselves from. We think other people are old, but us? No. Never.

Maybe that’s why I’m not a fan of Glory Days. Because it’s too real. Because it’s too hard for me to accept how impermanent my life is.

When you look around at your life — the people, relationships, your school years, your jobs – accepting the fact that all these things are fleeting and will one day be gone can be challenging, if not downright terrifying. I mean, we identify ourselves with these things and if we lose those identifiers, we can lose ourselves and long for the past, wrestle with age, and listen to Glory Days on repeat. 

No matter how we try to escape it, the reality of impermanence will eventually catch up with us and force us to deal with it. 

This very moment — changing soccer teams, celebrating a birthday, graduating, the death of a grandmother — can be a catalyst for a shift in perception and a valuable lesson in acceptance. In moments of change, we can accept and explore the impermanent nature of our own lives. Which can be both oddly comforting and oddly inspiring. Everything, everyone passes – like they always have, like they always should.

Glory Days helped me to realize, when we allow ourselves to consciously recognize the impermanence of all things, we appreciate our time, our experiences more. We have more joy, more gratitude for this precious human lifetime in which we can connect with others.

And who knows, maybe your glory days will inspire you to write a song that will forever soundtrack high school reunions.

Be well,

Jay