Time & Perspective Quote by Van Morrison

Van Morrison’s line lands like a growled warning in the middle of a groove: the future isn’t a horizon you move toward, it’s a bouncer at the door of your actual life. “Keeping you out” turns planning into exclusion. It suggests we don’t merely drift into distraction; we get locked out by the stories we tell about what’s next - the album you’ll make, the love you’ll find, the version of yourself that finally arrives and fixes everything.

The phrasing matters. He doesn’t say the future “pulls” you forward, which could sound hopeful, even heroic. He says it keeps you out, blunt and physical, like you’re pressed against glass watching your own present happen without you. That’s classic Morrison: mystical on the surface, practical in the gut. His music has long been obsessed with immediacy - the “in the moment” charge of soul, jazz, and gospel, where the point isn’t perfection but presence. This sentence reads like an anti-productivity mantra from someone who’s watched ambition calcify into a kind of spiritual procrastination.

The subtext is also cultural. Late modern life trains us to live in preview mode: notifications, forecasts, career ladders, wellness plans. The future becomes a constant admin task. Morrison flips that script, implying the most radical thing you can do is stop rehearsing tomorrow and re-enter today. Not as a self-help slogan, but as a demand: if you’re always arriving later, you never arrive at all.