Time & Perspective Quote by Suzanne Farrell

Farrell’s line has the blunt clarity of someone who’s spent a lifetime training her attention to land exactly where her body is. A dancer can’t fake presence; the audience reads it in a wrist, a breath, the fraction of a beat you arrive late to your own movement. Calling distraction “ungrateful” isn’t just moral scolding. It’s an artist’s critique: to treat your current minute as a placeholder is to refuse the one resource you can’t rehearse, bank, or redo.

The repetition in “moment you are living” and “really living” works like a choreographic echo, insisting that time is not abstract. It’s physical. In ballet, the “somewhere else” is seductive: the next role, the next company, the next correction that will finally make you worthy. Farrell came up inside an ecosystem where aspiration is constant and approval is scarce, where your imagination is always sprinting ahead of your actual feet. Her warning lands as both self-defense and professionalism: longing can be fuel, but it’s also a kind of vandalism, scratching out the present in the name of an imagined future.

The subtext is sharper: wishing yourself elsewhere is not neutrality; it’s a withdrawal from your own life. Farrell frames attention as gratitude because attention is the only honest payment you can make to an experience while it’s happening. If you keep bargaining with the now, you don’t just miss the moment. You practice missing it, until absence becomes your default stance.