And we’re back!  Safely out of music festival madness from June, let’s continue on this meme-tastic journey.  If you’d like to take a spin through the first 14 days, click here.

A Song That Describes You

Such a broad and sweeping question and yet, a cruel one:  music addict, choose a single song that describes you.  All of you.  In one song.

Go on, try it yourself.  If you have any sort of expansive collection, this will prove challenging.  I have songs that speak to me in sorrow, others in joy.  I have songs that speak of my past, my present, my desired future.  I can list songs that speak to the best parts of me and the worst. Within that last statement, I finally find my answer:  a song that speak to both at once.

I am someone who strives to live without regret, although that is far easier said than done.  Regrets are many in my private little ledger of good and bad choices, and I often find myself drifting into a mental prison where I shift the abacus beads back and forth, trying to make two and two equal four, or something close to it.  I usually end up with a negative integer.  My regrets have shaped me, for better or worse.  They have been forks in the road, doors swinging closed, landslides blocking the path I want to traverse.  They are clouds blocking the sun, eclipses that plunge me into inky midnight without a beacon to guide me home.

But then, music is there.  It guides me with my other senses, steers me back to where I need to be.

Regrets can be healthy, but only to a point.  We learn from our mistakes or ought to, lest we repeat them.  We grow as individuals when we carefully examine our lives and the choices we made, or didn’t make.  But to dwell on our mistakes, to wallow in regret and linger in its skeletal grasp – that’s soul-crushing.  It robs us of freedom to take a new fork, to apply the lesson and perhaps reach a destination that might not be the one we set out towards, but is somehow right for us.

“It’s hard to dance with a devil on your back
But given half the chance, would I take any of it back?”

I have seen more pain than is my fair share.  I don’t exaggerate, nor do I seek pity.  I say this because even though I have suffered, that suffering has brought me to people, places and opportunities that I never would have found otherwise.  I would trade away none of these for the removal of that pain.  The pain is the contrast, the context of the happiness.  Opposites give each other meaning.

I try to live without regrets.  And when they seep in and smother me, I turn on music, and remind myself to dance.

Shake It Out – Florence + The Machine