Songfacts®:

• For the Drama album, Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes of The Buggles took over for Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman. They wrote this song with the incumbent trio: Steve Howe, Chris Squire and Alan White. Downes told Songfacts: "That was one that was written in the studio. Chris was playing a bass riff [sings the riff] with Alan, and I started whacking some chords over the top of it. It really developed in the studio. It was more of a jam, how it initially started out."
• Trevor Horn wrote the lyric with Chris Squire. The theme is the cycles of life, but it's rather abstract, with lines like:
  
  Time is the measure before it's begun
  Slips away like running water
  
  Conceptually, it's not far off from what Jon Anderson wrote for the band, but the word choices and structures are very different.
• Geoff Downes and Trevor Horn had to be coerced into joining Yes, and their subsequent tour was difficult for Horn, who was more comfortable in a studio than on stage. After that tour, Downes and Horn went back to the Buggles, and Yes disbanded. When they returned in 1983 with the album 90125, Jon Anderson returned. That album contained another "happening" song: "It Can Happen."