I recently heard Blind Melon’s Change for the first time–I know, it’s one of their first songs, it just wasn’t my thing at the time–and I believe we receive messages when we are meant to, so this was my time. We talk about the power of words and listening to this song, admittedly the first time I’ve heard it, stopped me in my tracks.  This is where I’ve always found my passion for words.  This is why words matter to me.  Words are the etchings, the recordings of time, of a moment, that capture the visceral feeling that we have.  In some respects they transport me around and I have a near existential crisis as I sit in my office thinking and feeling what it was like as a kid to be in my house, to know that those times are gone, wondering what my siblings felt and thought at that time as well.  How we all learned to live our lives in our own way.  How there is this knowing we all have, these feelings we have that we can’t explain yet we know are true.  I’ve written for years about not knowing what happens in my life after a certain point and it’s true.  I’m listening to this song and it was one of the first released and he knew what was going to happen to him on some level.  He also knew what to do to fix it.  We all know what we need to do to fix it, but the question is if we do it.     

“I know we can’t all stay here forever so I want to write my words on the face of today before they’re painted,” Shannon Hoon. The other side of this is believing that definition of who we are.  Sticking with it no matter what because we don’t know who else we can be.  We have to be willing to let those pieces of us, those definitions of who we are, die because when we let those pieces die we allow the rest of the pieces that remain to live. We have to be more willing to live than we are to die with the image we’ve created. Most importantly in this song is the line about not seeing the sun from where we’re sitting.  Sometimes we have to move.  Simply move, decide to step out of the shadow.  Step out of the darkness we carry, let the sun fall behind us.  And the line that says, “When life is hard, you have to change,”  he acknowledges looking for the good when we are down rather than staying in the dark.  So when things get hard, we have to change our outlook on it or we have to change the view.