This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show with Scott Mills.
Bob Dylan is coming to Leeds next month and this has caused me an existential crisis.
I went to see him last year in Liverpool, but he’s now extended his ‘Rough & Rowdy Ways’ tour … and I can’t decide whether or not to see him doing the same set list again. To be honest, how can I justify the expense at a time when I’m preparing to retire two weeks later and do the costly move back to Liverpool?
So, yesterday I decided to listen to the album again – as brilliant as it was the first time I heard it. But, this time, the opening verse of the first song hit me afresh: “Today, and tomorrow, and yesterday, too / The flowers are dyin’ like all things do.”
Cheerful, eh? A great way to start a Tuesday morning on Radio 2!
But, Dylan has never bothered about when or where or how people hear his music. He tells the truth and leaves it up to us – adults – to make of it what we will. And in the opening lines of this album he sets the context for everything that follows. Because the truth behind almost every song ever played on Radio 2 is that time rolls on, we all get older, the seasons change, and we are all very mortal. It’s always been the same … but we sometimes try to avoid it – hoping we can stay young and beautiful for ever.
Well, the good news is this: being aware of how fragile and transient life is should make us enjoy it more – live it more fully. Eloquent poets and wild-eyed prophets wrote three thousand years ago about how the grass withers and the flowers fade. But, they weren’t gloomy or miserable! They knew how to live – and how to enable others to live abundantly, too.
In another song Dylan sings: “Be reasonable, mister, be honest, be fair / Let all of your earthly thoughts be a prayer.” Well, my simple prayer today is: amid the uncertainties and as everything changes, may love be the constant thread.
Still can’t decide about the Leeds gig.
