The best feeling in the world? Listening to Spotify on shuffle and stumbling across an amazing song with complex lyrics and a murky meaning. Seriously, don't fight me on this.
While one day engaging in the above-mentioned activity, I heard Fall Out Boy's Just One Yesterday. Aside from the great sound of it, I was particularly taken with the lyrics. There are multiple interpretations of the song's true story, and Fall Out Boy themselves even touch on it briefly. However, the words that stood out to me the most were the last two lines of the chorus:
"I'd trade all my tomorrows
For just one yesterday."
Because I'm not sure what I make of the song as a whole, I plucked these two lines from their place in the song and thought on their intrinsic meaning. "All my tomorrows" meaning the future, the singer is essentially saying that he'd give up everything for the chance to relive the past.
There have undoubtedly been moments when each of us have yearned for days gone by. Nothing beats the 'good ol' days,' especially when we look back on them. But that's the thing about the past, we tend to glamorize it and overlook all of the bad things going on at the time. Perhaps it's because we need to make ourselves happier with our present by believing we had better times in the past, but nostalgia often serves as rose colored glasses for the dissatisfied. That being said, the past can be a happy retreat from the harsh realities of the present. Part of the appeal of the past is that we can view with certainty the positive aspects of our previous days, ignoring the bad parts so that we can focus on the good. This "idealized past" is a sanctuary with which many choose to comfort themselves.
Who wouldn't 'trade all their tomorrows' for life in a glamorized past? But when you realistically consider the past and balance it against all of the potential that future days hold, would it really be worth it?
Isn't it always the way with life that we don't know how good we have it until it's long gone? Perhaps that's the reason the past always seems so appealing. I'm not trying to sway you one way or the other here. I myself toy with the idea. Maybe if you were to go back to the past with your present knowledge, it would feel like paradise. Or maybe not.
All I'm saying is that it's a question worth considering. Or maybe the reason the past was better is because we weren't sitting around having discussions about the passage of time and better days in our life. We were too busy living it.
