But the one written work that really gets under my skin, in the vein of being a spectator vs. participant in life... and this might be cliche, but it's Pink Floyd's song Time.
...Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way...
...And then the one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run you missed the starting gun...
...The time is gone the song is over, thought I'd something more to say...
What I find particularly interesting is this was written when the band felt they were losing relevance - by this point they had a run as long as and were about as old as The Beatles when they had broken up. A rock band back then entering their 30s who hadn't really broken out was doomed, right? What examples to the contrary were there? Yet Dark Side of the Moon is where their life as cultural icons began. Time is the only song on the album credited to all four members of the band.
I'm 36 years old and spent the first 15 years of my professional life working in the enterprise doing C++/C#, with all the wonderful trappings of Office Space. I'm proud of some of the work I did but overall I was pretty unhappy.
5 mos ago I quit my job to become a contractor. I do Rails work for a couple long-term clients based in NYC. This might not be a big deal to most people here... all I can say is I've never been happier. It's like, "I did it. And this is just the beginning."
They say it takes only 21 days to cultivate a habit. They also say major life decisions can happen in an instant, like a flick of the switch. I don't know how much of that is actually true, perhaps it's best to not ponder things like that too much.