Be Yourself.
(Chris Cornell)
Someone falls to pieces sleeping all alone,
And someone kills the pain.
Spinning in the silence,
She finally drifts away.
Someone gets excited in a chapel yard
And catches a bouquet.
Another lays a dozen white roses on a grave.
To be yourself is all that you can do.
To be yourself is all that you can do.
Someone finds salvation in everyone,
Another only pain.
Someone tries to hide himself,
Down inside himself he prays.
Someone swears his true love until the end of time,
Another runs away.
Separate or united,
Healthy or insane...
And to be yourself is all that you can do.
To be yourself is all that you can do.
Even when you've paid enough,
Been put upon, or been held up
With every single memory of
The good or bad faces of luck,
Don't lose any sleep tonight,
I'm sure everything will end up alright;
You may win or lose...
But to be yourself is all that you can do.
To be yourself is all that you can do.
To be yourself is all that you can do.
To be yourself is all that you can do.
9 comments:
I've been listening to this today. :)
When all is said and done, it's all any of us can ever be. And yeah, I do think it will all work out in the end. We just have no idea where the end is in these tangled balls of string we call our lives.
Very well said! I agree with you. We have to accept who we are if we're ever to find happiness or meaning in our lives. No use in envying others or in trying to be something you're not.
I especially like those last four lines. Sorry I have not been visiting much lately, I have developed err new, errrr, shall we say 'interest' in Austria of all places but I will look in more often.
I hope you are ok.
y'know, i always considered Chris to be walking a fine line with this song between the idea of 'just be yourself and you'll be ok' and 'no matter what you do, you are already being yourself'. kinda depends on the mood i'm in and i guess that's the genius of the song.
honestly, i'm usually on the latter side of the debate-no matter what you do or think, positive or negative, shallow or deep, that's who you are. you can't be anyone else because you can't be.
Technically true of course. Maybe thinking that way is pointless existentialism though, and allows us to absolve ourselves more comfortably of moral obligations. Or maybe the universe really is pointlessly in existence and we have no moral obligations. I know what you mean, I go back and forth too. In the end I do what I think is "best" - whatever that means - and am never quite clear how I arrived at the decision. I suppose it's a mixture of genetically encoded and culturally learned values.
First of all you need to know who you are, and then accept it. That's how I understand this - it's all about self acceptance.
That's as sensible an explanation as any, and probably what he 'meant,' although as everyone know poets and musicians often shy away from an explanation such; it's up to the readers/listeners to hear in it what makes sense to them and means the most.
"It says nothing to be about my life..."
Jimbo, I suspect you are being coy with your comment about the 'last four lines' but at any rate it's a pleasure to hear from you! I know precisely the nature of your interest in Austria and yes, she and it are lovely. I've not been to a proper ballet I'm sorry to say, I shall have to try for tickets the next time something worthy comes to San Francisco.
I'm doing pretty well, I sort of lay my emotions out on the line here (though not all the time), so I'm rather transparent in that way, which has its benefits and drawbacks. But it keeps me honest, and keeps me writing (or posting in some fashion).
I was delighted to read your explanation of the "poop deck" and other nautical terms!
Take care and stop by whenever you feel like it. I'll try to up the scientific content for you if I can muster the will to do so rather than just think it silently to myself. It's so much easier to follow a train of thought to its conclusions and then dismiss it or file it away as it is to actually transcribe the thing for others to read. But it does inevitably pay dividends both in clarifying one's thoughts as well in possibly education or at least interesting someone else on the same subject.
I READ and watch and otherwise consume a ton of scientific material, but often find the task of presenting it daunting. You must struggle with this yourself, though you have an easy way about your entries where you just exposit without drawing grand conclusions. You're a true experimentalist at heart it seems to me.
Edwin Hubble was very much like that, insisting only on collecting the finest data he could on thing like redshift of stars, nebulae ("island universes"), and so forth, and though he must have drawn many implications from his startling finds, he remained almost obstinately experimental and left it to "better minds than his" to interpret the results: The expansion of the universe and the idea of a plethora of galaxies rather than simply out own, in this case. There weren't all than many better minds than his around when it came to astronomy at that time, so I admire him greatly for this attitude. He stuck to his job and did it to perfection, which I suppose is why the first space telescope was named after him.
Well, cheers and I hope we shall talk again soon!
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