This freaking song is stuck in my head, but it has an interesting message
My friend has a little girl who is currently obsessed with Frozen 2.
This Disney franchise has a knack for churning out songs that get stuck in your head like nasty little ear worms.
I don’t want to be too mean here. I have love / hate feelings about Frozen. Yes, it’s great that we now have empowered female heroines at the centre of our fairy tales. I love that Elsa’s central challenge is to accept and then celebrate her own inner powers.
But, do we still have to have entitled, size 6 little princesses, made to look like some sort of gelfling-human hybrid with those strange almond eyes that are all the rage these days?
The message still seems to be, yes, it’s ok to show the world your ferocious inner powers, but you still need to be a babe in a swooshy party dress when you do it.
Anyway, my friend’s daughter is currently obsessed with one of the songs by Olaf, the snow-man. His only function in the movie is comic-relief (though buggered if I can see what’s funny about him).
Anyway, the song is called something like, “This will all make sense when I’m older,” and it’s about how he’s sure that the strange and fantastical events that are happening to them will all make sense once he has a little more life experience and perspective.
I expect he’s going to be disappointed.
I’ve been thinking a bit about this (because that stupid song is stuck in my freaking head!) and I think it’s something we all want to believe is true.
We all want to believe that there is some sort of logic to experience. That all the odd and random experiences that go into making up our lives will one day just fall into place.
Suddenly, we’ll see the logic of everything – how everything fits together, how every individual moment supports the larger unfolding narratives of our life.
“Of course! I had to have that horse-riding accident when I was 12, so I would become afraid of animals, which would lead me into that romantic trist with that dashing veterinarian, and which would then enable me to save the dukes life from that assassination attempt because I was super-sensitive to the twitching of his nervous horse.”
Yeah, nah. Life is not like this.
I know we all want everything to make sense – we all want every injustice to be reconciled in our lifetimes – but I think the great discipline of life is learning how to live in the bewildering randomness of it all.
If there is a great plan to it the universe, I think it is beyond the ken of human perception.
And the danger is that we clench up. We try to get a tight grip on our experiences, because we want everything to fit into the boxes we have built to understand our life.
We can drive ourselves mad trying to keep that sort of control of our lives.
Far better to let yourself drop into what Rumi calls “love’s confusing joy”.
That takes courage, but I don’t see that there’s any other way.
So, sorry you stupid little snowman. Life is never going to make sense. It’d probably be boring if it did.
Now get out of my head.
DB