You don’t need to complete the song

Do you ever get a song with a catchy chorus stuck in your head?  Sometimes when this happens to me it may just be half the chorus playing over and over again “You’re Beautiful” “Call Me Maybe”.   You can tell your mind over and over again to just let it go (I just unintentionally got that song stuck in my head just now) but the more you fight it, the more it plays over and over again.  The way to resolve this would be to actually play the song.  It’s as easy as saying… “Hey Siri… Alexa… Cortana… play ‘Remember Me’ from the Coco Soundtrack”.  Problem solved.  Your brain hears it a couple of times and then it is satisfied long enough to leave you alone.

Back when I was a kid this was a little harder to resolve.  If I had a song stuck in my head or I heard a song that I thought was amazing I had a couple of options.  I could take a cassette tape and record the radio for hours in hopes that the song would come back on the radio or I could get on my bike and ride to the drug store that sold 45s (small records with 2 songs) and buy the song to play over and over on my record player.  Back then it was a lot of work!  Let’s just say I had a lot of 45s and cassette tapes in my teen years.

The way the brain works is that regardless of whether you want it to or not, it tries to constantly problem solve.  It can leave you restless during the day and tossing and turning all night.  It wants to make sense of the world around you.  Where the problem lies is that many of the things that occupy our mental space will never be resolved. You can’t solve it with a “Hey Siri” or a bike ride to the store.  You will never know all the secrets of the universe or why your friend didn’t text you back right away.  On those things that can be resolved try to get enough information within reason and don’t be afraid to ask questions if you need that peace of mind.  But with that said, not everything will have a solution and you will need to be okay with that.  If you can accept the fact that in this world not everything will ever make sense, people you care about will make irrational emotional decisions that don’t make sense to you, and you will make irrational emotional decisions that won’t make sense to yourself and others.  

There is no perfect song, there is no perfect situation, there is no perfect life.  Things don’t make sense but if you can accept the harmony of the disharmony, you will be able to enjoy this life despite it’s flaws.  

Be okay with not knowing the rest of the song.

Updated on: October 12th, 2019