Life Lessons From Regina Spektor

Sometimes I listen to songs forever without actually hearing them. And it's not like I'm only vaguely familiar. It's not like I can only hum the tune. Sometimes I mark songs as favorites. I know all the words, I rack up a high play count on iTunes, I sing it in my head for days, etc. And yet, I never really hear the song until one day when it just seeps in and resonates from a cranial epicenter of understanding. Suddenly, the lyrics click and my awareness shifts, and the whole song really sinks in.

This bizarre phenomena happened again to me today. I was driving my dad home from lunch, he was passed out in the passenger's seat. I was coasting up the main road home, the windows were down, the wind brushing through my hair, the sun lathering my skin. I had put my "Sunshine Mix" in the CD player. I value Sunshine music a lot. It's the music you can feel the warmth coursing through. The beat is happy, the tempo is all smiles, and you are physically obligated to sing along; it's an impulse that's impossible to control. With Sunshine music, the windows always have to be rolled down.

So, I was driving in the car, and "On the Radio" came on. "On the Radio" is secretly one of my favorite Regina Spektor songs, and I feel like it's severely underrated. The lyrics are great, the beat is potent, and the orchestration is pretty flawless. I added the song to countless playlists and CDs, racked up 42 plays on my iTunes, and even gave it an astounding 5-star rating. And yet, I somehow managed to avoid connecting to the song until this afternoon. Then, very suddenly, I felt the shift. The song started speaking to me, just like "Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)," and I heard the lyrics.

"This is how it works: you're young until you're not, you love until you don't, you try until you can't, you laugh until you cry, you cry until you laugh, and everyone must breathe until their dying breath."

It's going to sound stupid making cliché statements about the lines that smacked me in the face, but come on. Regina just fires off these amazing truths, these common sense-isms that most of us subconsciously know. And yet we're completely oblivious to them. We ties ourselves up in these superfluous complications in our lives, and we forget the most simplistic things. We forget to just live. Life becomes cluttered with education, car payments, vanity, fashion, broken relationships, everything. And, in the end, all that should really matter is that we're alive.

...Shouldn't it?

"No, this is how it works: you peer inside yourself. You take the things you like, then try to love the things you took. And then you take that love you made and stick it into some, someone else's heart pumpin' someone else's blood. And walkin' arm and arm, you hope it don't get harmed. But even it does, you just do it all again."

I don't even know how to articulate how I feel about these lyrics. I think Regina just knew it though. I don't know where she pulls these lyrics from, but they're completely brilliant to me. Who knew there was a step-by-step guide to loving yourself? Who knew there was a step-by-step guide to loving someone else? I don't know... Maybe I'm reading too much into these lyrics. Maybe I'm kind of crazy and they're not that great, but damnit! It just makes sense to me. We get so worried about everything that's happened and should happen, and we forget what's happening.

But the most important things are all there. We are young until we're not. We must all love fiercely until we stop, and be honest when we do. And we can never stop trying. Life should be full of laughter. Hysterical laughter that brings tears. And when it hurts and life sucks, the best thing to do is to laugh anyway.

In order to love someone else, we have to love ourselves first. We have to find that love within, because it's only after we've found internal love that we can express it to someone else. Maybe that's how to truly know what it is to fall in love. Once we feel our own love, we can feel the love for someone else. We can give them the self acceptance, the joy, the compassion. The tighter we embrace ourselves, the wider our arms open for someone else. And that person has to embrace themselves to embrace you too. Maybe love doesn't work until we reach that perfect symmetry. Without the symmetry, we get harmed. And then we try again.

What else matters? I just want to try my hardest to get to that point. Because in the end, the only thing I care about is that I'm breathing still. As long as I'm breathing, I can live, love, cry, laugh, cry some more, try my best, and love intensely. And I will keep fighting and breathing, until my dying breath.

But until then, it's all or nothing.

Post Script: I apologize for the crippling amount of cliché epiphanies in this entry. Sometimes cliché is the only way to go, I guess.