Time & Perspective Quote by Greg Lake

Lake’s phrasing has the blunt fatigue of someone who’s already lived the dream and discovered its hidden trap: success can turn into a schedule. When he says he “wasn’t making the most” of his life or creativity, he isn’t confessing a lack of talent; he’s diagnosing a kind of artistic stagnation that happens when a band becomes an institution. With Emerson, Lake & Palmer, the stakes were always high - technical virtuosity, big concepts, big stages. The irony is that those very expectations can freeze an artist into repeating the version of himself that audiences paid for.

“Marking time” is the key expression. It’s a musician’s metaphor that doubles as an existential one: keeping tempo without moving the song forward. The intent is practical (leave, change course, reclaim agency) but the subtext is bruised: he’s aware that longevity can become a slow bargain where you trade risk for reliability. Lake isn’t romanticizing struggle; he’s refusing autopilot.

The context matters because prog rock, maybe more than any genre, is haunted by its own legacy. Once you’ve helped define a sound, you can spend decades touring the proof of it. Lake’s line reads like a late-career corrective to nostalgia culture: a push against the idea that an artist’s job is to reenact his peak for eternity.

And then the human punch: “Life is to short.” The misspelling almost improves it - less slogan, more urgency. It lands like someone talking fast because they’ve finally stopped waiting.