If you had a theme song for your life, what would it be right now? Is there a song that you think applies to the situations you are in today?
It is not a favorite song of ours, and we haven’t studied the lyrics, but the chorus of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” has been coming to mind often lately. We’re in a small town with few job opportunities, but we can’t afford to move to a better location.
We all know success when we all find our own dreams,
And our love is enough to knock down any walls,
And the future’s been seen as men try to realize,
The simple secret of the note in us all
It’s a conscious daily choice right now to stay active and keep taking the steps to move forward, which means I have to feel the pain. The alternative would be to give in to numbness and depression, which would mean no hope of making things better.
I don’t want this to come across as dramatic or worrisome, but it’s just a simple fact that happiness is not coming my way any time soon. So I just set my sights on being useful and content. That requires waking up each morning and facing the pain.
*Heartless powers try to tell us what to think
If the spirit’s sleeping, then the flesh is ink, yeah
History’s page, it is thusly carved in stone
The future’s here, we are it, we are on our own
On our own. On our own. On our own.
If the game is lost then we’re all the same
No one left to place or take the blame
We will leave this place an empty stone
Or that shinning ball of blue we can call our home
*
My deepest feeling and deepest fear both exist in Harry Chapin’s “Mr. Tanner.” It has been my personal theme song since the first time I heard it.
Music was his life; it was not his livelihood
And it made him feel so happy, it made him feel so good
He sang from his heart, and he sang from his soul
He did not know how well he sang; it just made him whole
The song named like the thread title above this thread at the moment immediately matched with my impression of the political development over the past years and my personal state of my mind in times of disaster and madness: