Song of the Week: Working to Live or Living to Work- Prince Ea

Prince Ea is a rapper and activist. He founded a movement called The ‘Make Smart’ Cool Movement. It promotes education, intelligence, unity and creativity.
 

• Listen to the song a few times to see how much you understand ( don´t read the lyrics yet!)
• Then read the complete lyrics transcribed by course 15-16 students at the end of the post- we´ve had more than two thousand international visits to this post since then!

Lyrics transcribed by a group of advanced EFL/ESL students from Spain
Thanks for visiting this post! We are happy to share our work. 

WORKING TO LIVE OR LIVING TO WORK

I read a study yesterday.

It said that last year more than half of us actually chose not to take our full vacations from our jobs.

Question:

Don’t you think it’s crazy that so many of us are going to work even when we don’t need to be there?

Times we could be on the beach buried in sand or travelling the earth, we spend it in the office traveling from desk to desk, buried in paper work.

See, in this chaotic world where everything goes so fast. We’re so busy! Seems like everyone’s middle name is “multitask”.

But now, before you go and act all ´holier than thou´

How many extra tabs do you have opened on your computer, right now?

See, we all need to get away from the race for our family, friends, for the sake of our mental state.

Time to rewind, recharge, reconnect.

No reporting to the office on e-mails that should be on redirect.

Because life, ladies and gentlemen, is all about moments.

No one in history’s ever been able to hold on to one, not a single soul, and you never get them back.  See? There one goes.

No do over, no rewind, no DVD root menu to skip to a previous scene.

Ask yourself:

How many trips did you almost take?

How many sights have you almost seen?

How many moments have you lost thinking about the next one?

Thinking that once you get this or you get there maybe that would be the best one

Life has taught me that all we will ever have is now.

Let me be perfectly clear. I’m not saying: quit your job. Even though I know you deserve a six-month vacation twice a year… But how about small steps?

Short trips with long dances, no distractions.

Spend the time with family instead of co-workers, meditation instead or aggravation, replace our screensavers with sunrises, palm pilots with palm trees , jammed copy machines with… . Man, I really hate jammed copy machines.

The most precious thing we have in life are moments.

Let´s make the most of them before they disappear. Let´s see the world while we still can and cherish those while they´re still here.

Because when our lives are almost over, it won’t matter how much money we made, or hours we worked, times we got “employee of the month”.

What we´ll look back on are the memories we made , the hours we spent with those we loved, and were we father of the month, mother of the year, friend of a life time.

Holidays should be a time where we go away and come together. From now on let´s take a whole vacation and be fully present, creating memories that will last forever.