Rewind, by Jeff

“Nobody said it was easy.
It’s such a shame for us to part.
Nobody said it was easy.
No one ever said it would be this hard.
Oh, take me back to the start.”

- Coldplay, The Scientist

I try to limit my enjoyment of Coldplay in general. But they got it right in this song. They plastered truth over every square inch of it.

We fill our lives with mistakes, measure our growth by them, arrogantly vow to never repeat them. They are both the fuel of our progress and the signposts by which we gauge our distance traveled.

Which is what makes this song so captivating. The lure and mystique of starting over, of forgetting our mistakes and our troublesome situations, of removing worry by removing experience, instead of attempting to absorb some sort of lesson from our mistakes, is powerful. After all, maybe we lose too much of our selves in the learning of these lessons. Maybe being ignorant, innocent and unsullied is better then being wise and damaged. Maybe the supposed lessons we learn are useless rationalizations to prove to ourselves that we are better people now, better for surviving whatever we just survived.

Or maybe we are better off learning the lessons and facing the adversity of life, I honestly don’t know. But even if that were true, even if everything I’d written above was wrong, wouldn’t it still be tempting to just start things over? Would you rather face a gut-wrenching loss and survive it, a little tougher and a little more cynical, or erase it completely, lesson unlearned and psyche unharmed? Is it better to have loved and lost? Or to have loved…and rewound?

Or to put it another way: do you think you are a better person today than you were when you were four years old? Do you think you are a happier person?

Nobody said it was easy. No one ever said it would be this hard.