On The Turning Away

There is a Pink Floyd song from 1987 called “On The Turning Away.”

On The Turning Away – Pink Floyd (Lyrics)

It sits on an album called A Momentary Lapse of Reason. If you have never heard it, go find it after you read this. Put it on some evening when the house is quiet. It is worth a few minutes of your day.

The song is about a simple thing. It is about the moment we look away from someone who is struggling. Not the big, cruel acts. The small one. The glance that slides off. The step to the other side of the street.

It takes that moment and holds it up to the light. Then it asks a hard question. What happens to us when we make a habit of it?

The answer it gives is not pretty. The turning away does not stay small. It grows. A little at a time, the light goes out of a place. And one day you look around and find there is nobody left to turn toward.

I have been thinking about that song all week. I think it was written for right now, almost forty years early.

Turning away has never been easier than it is today. You can scroll past. You can mute. You can change the channel. A screen lets you look at a thousand hurting people and feel nothing, because to the screen they are only pictures. The machine does the turning for you, and you never feel your neck move.

We tell ourselves it is somebody else’s trouble. Not my town. Not my kind. They brought it on themselves. Every one of those lines is a door closing. We close them so quietly we don’t hear the latch.

The song warns about that exact thought. If you decide someone’s hurt belongs only to them, you have already joined in. You don’t have to do any harm to be part of it. You only have to look the other way.

That is the part that stuck with me. Turning away does not feel like doing anything. That is why it is so dangerous. Nobody ever feels guilty for what they didn’t see.

It is also how a country comes apart. Not in one big break. In a million small turnings. Each of us turning from someone a little different, until nobody is facing anybody at all.

Look at where we are, a few days out from an election. The noise teaches us to turn away from half the country. It tells us those people are not worth hearing. That is the turning away dressed up as loyalty, and it is the same old thing underneath.

Last time, I wrote about the tired farmer and the mother at the gas pump. They were people on both sides, standing on the same hard edge. The easiest thing in the world is to look past the ones whose sign doesn’t match yours. The song says don’t. Their trouble is your trouble, or it will be.

But the song does not end in the dark. Near the close, it turns. It calls for the looking away to stop. And it does not only mean turning toward the people who are struggling. It means facing the cold spot in ourselves that made it so easy to look away in the first place.

That is the harder half. Looking at the other fellow is one thing. Looking at the part of you that wanted to look away is something else.

Every one of us has that cold spot. Having it is not the sin. Everybody gets tired. Everybody gets scared. Everybody has days when they cannot carry one more person’s trouble. The question is what you do with the cold spot once you know it is there.

What does stopping look like? Not anything grand. Small things, done on purpose. Hold the look a second longer. Ask the question. Wait for the answer. Let the person be a person instead of a sticker on a bumper.

It might be a stranger. More likely, it is somebody close. A cousin you quit talking to over politics. A neighbor whose flag you don’t care for. An old friend who went one way while you went the other. Those are the turnings that cost us the most, because we used to face each other.

The song closes by wondering out loud whether all this is only a dream. That is a fair question. It was a fair question in 1987, and it still is.

Here is my answer. It is only a dream if we leave it to somebody else. The turning away was always done one person at a time. So the turning back gets done the same way. Nobody can do it for you, and nobody has to wait for permission.

This week, do two things. Put the song on and really listen to it. Then go face one person you have been looking past. You don’t have to fix anything. You don’t have to win anything. You just have to look and stay looking.

That is how the light comes back into a place. Not all at once. One face at a time, until we are facing each other again.

The song is almost forty years old. The question in it is older than any of us. The answer is still ours to give.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

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