Creativity Quote by Kathy Mattea

Mattea isn’t selling a self-help slogan; she’s staging an ambush. The opening line piles up vague “things” - illness, loss, age, whatever finally breaks your sense of infinite tomorrows - and then lands on the blunt reveal: you are “a mortal person.” That plain phrasing matters. It’s not poetic. It’s the kind of sentence you hear when the room gets quiet and nobody’s performing anymore.

The key move is the choice she offers: “cruise through your life.” That verb is doing a lot of cultural work. Cruising is pleasant, default, autopilot - a life managed in routines, distractions, and deferred risks. She’s not moralizing against comfort; she’s warning about time’s stealth. The threat isn’t catastrophe, it’s subtraction: you’ll “open your eyes at some point, and it’s gone.” Gone is deliberately unspecific. Not just youth, but chances, relationships, the version of yourself you kept assuming you’d get around to becoming.

As a musician, Mattea’s register is conversational, built for listeners who know how quickly a chorus ends. There’s also an adult realism here that fits her era: late-20th-century American life with its promises of limitless reinvention, colliding with the very non-negotiable fact of aging. The intent isn’t to frighten you into productivity; it’s to make you conscious. Wake up now, she’s saying, because waking up later is the same as not waking up at all.