Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.28

Feel the Light
Jennifer Lopez

Where's the delicacy of light?
My mother told me to look under leaves for it,
To find it in soft-shadowed stands of trees.
My eyes grew too accustomed:
I forgot your exuberance.
Your life is more than my expectations of you.
Where's the beauty of shadow?
You taught me to look at the edge
of a beam of cut-splinter light,
to think about the end of a long age of loneliness,
to wrap myself in the memory of finding
a someone.

Lyrics
This song is so uplifting, so positive. But strangely, I'm pretty sure that back in 2014 when I first listened to this soundtrack, it didn't stand out to me. It has taken its place, now. I've now played it more often than any other song on the list. But it took its time to grow.

I'm not unique. I know other people live their pasts over again in their heads, wish backward, hope with hindsight. I know I think back to the happy accidents of my life--finding Capitol Reef, being staggered by my favorite National Monument (which will here go unnamed, for fear you might search for an image and be robbed of its immensity), my bewitching experience at Mount Rushmore. I can reach further back, too. The night I knew I was in love, Jan Haluska telling me to pursue a doctorate, screaming at God in the rain--these are points of extreme illumination fixed to peaks that tower over the flat plains of my life's memory. That's what this song is about. It's about casting back to the moments that you've allowed to define you and being shocked and staggered again by how close, how possible, how real they seem, even now.

Maybe you're not a romantic. I am. I learned this about myself in college, and I've regretted it ever since. I'm emotionally invested in sunsets and sunrises. I find myself staring at beetles and condensation and the weave of a rough-spun fabric. This isn't because of some depth of character or intellect. Far be it from me to insinuate. I'm breathless and distracted so often because I throw myself entirely into a beautiful moment when it catches me. Again, let me clarify. It's possible to be articulate and value logic and skepticism and to come across as reasonable and well-founded and simultaneously be unable to stop staring at a sunset even though it's at a forty five degree angle from your direction of travel and you're endangering your car and your life to stare at it. It's possible to be a fully-functioning human being and without conflict be required by your savagely beating heart to stop your car on the side of the road to run backward to stare at a waterfall through pines. It's possible to fully know the right thing to do or say in a relationship and to instead throw yourself utterly into the arms of another person who may or may not want what's best for you. It's completely without conflict to do all of these things and then to look back on them as the best moments of your life.

"Did you expect me to reason with thunder?" I know I cannot.

Stephen
Do you like sad music, or happy music? Do you tend to gravitate more towards one or the other? I've noticed I tend to learn sad music almost exclusively for the ukulele, but I honestly listen to a diversity of music. Why is that split? Why do I play a different set of music than I listen to? It's not like happy music sounds worse on a ukulele, I mean, for heaven's sake it's a twinky little sunshine instrument.

If you had to eliminate entirely one class of music from earth, which would you give the ax? Sad, or happy--you can only choose one.
This is maybe a better question this way: which type could humanity not live without?