“I find this strange comfort in being lost in life. Wherever I end up, will I belong there this time?”
-The Color Morale: “Strange Comfort”
Do you ever just get to a point in life where life just seems to stop and you’re stuck in the same spot for years? Ever just get stuck there and not know how to get out, and then after a while, you just stop caring and go on through the motions of life, wondering when things are going to move forward? Yeah, that’s life, I guess sometimes. There is time in life; for me, it started back when I was 18, maybe earlier, but I can`t seem to remember. But this one isn’t about me, it’s just a look out onto life, and existentialism look, if you will.
The lyric that opens this article is from a metal-core band by the name of The Color Morale. The song is called "Strange Comfort" that comes off their 2013 album “Know Hope.” This song hits hard with its lyrical content talking about how as life goes on, we lose our place and get stuck in a rut where we don’t know what we are doing, or where we are going and after a while, we just settle down in that spot and find home in it. It’s a existentialistic look into life that makes me think about where exactly I am and where I am going in life. It also makes me realize that I, amongst others, indeed settle into this unsettling pace of life and just stay in it, because it's all we know.
There comes a point in life where we begin to realize how the world works, and who we are as people. We start venturing out into the world on our own, making real life choices that hold real consequences to what happens. This is what is called growing up and becoming an adult, and in this day in age it starts at 18; for some, a lot younger. Sometimes, things happen in life we don’t understand, that throw us off kilter and puts us in a place of unsettlement; wether it’s an outside thing out of our control that we didn’t do, or it’s something we have done ourselves that turns our lives into a mess. Once this happens, we either try to fix it immediately, or we ponder it and let it take over, in personal experience both don’t work as well and you have to just sometimes go with it and work through it as time goes. Its moments such as these where we get caught up in life and you lose perspective of what is going on and you just get stuck somewhere you can’t get out of. At first its unsettling and we do whatever we can to get out of it, but as time grows we just get used to what goes on and we get numb to the world and just end up staying in that rut and going on through life just going on until something happens.
Sometimes nothing happens and we stop trying to fix things and make it better and just continue on as if everything is fine because we no longer know what is happening and we just accept that fact that we are stuck and go nowhere. Why is it that we do these things and why is that these things happen? After a while we even forget what the initial underlying cause of our messed up life is because we have just succumbed to it and gave up. We lose sight of our lives and what made things good and right and just wander aimlessly looking for anything that can give us some fulfillment in life that can show us that we are still here and doing something with our lives. We start to self-doubt and loathe because we no longer feel or think anything else because of things that have happened in our lives. We let things control and take us over and lose everything that gave our life meaning and settle for what we can get and stop going after what we know we need in life in order to live and get out of our rut.
Within doing this we tend to shut the world and others out, trying to get through life alone because sometimes we think its all we can do because no one else knows or cares about what's going on and we just stop people from coming in to keep things from getting worse, in most case doing exactly that is what continues to make things worse. We don't know why we do it, we just do it because we feel its the only way to get through. It becomes our shelter knowing that if we just seclude ourselves that things are better this way. We get so caught up in this mindset and we get comfortable in it that we will then do what we can to keep this isolated state where we just shut the world out and continue to wander aimlessly because now its something that we find solace and bliss in. It becomes our life; we accept it and continue to live in it, because this is what we convince ourselves is our new comfortable zone and nothing else. Yes, it is good to get away from the world and just be alone with your thoughts and yourself to figure things out, but when we start to make it a habit and it's all we do, it becomes another problem that anchors us into the rut we have made.
I am not saying that this is everyone in life; some have been able either surpass this stage In life, or find a way past it. But, there are still those out there are in this spot, and from what I have personally seen, there are people of college age who ae working to get by, trying to get to the next step in life, but somehow find themselves in an endless cycle of mishaps and missteps. Some say that this is life, and yes it is. Life is about learning and growing and making choices in life. Sometimes we make mistakes and sometimes we makes choices that end up in a bad way, but life is about ups and downs and trying to find a way to make things work. This rut doesn’t have to be forever, and this is only just the beginning of life. I believe that it truly does get better, but we have to actually get active in our lives and work to makes things work and makes things better so that somehow we can get out of the rut and start making headway. For some, it's an easy process; for others, it’s not and can end up being a living hell, but sometimes in getting lost, we find other people who are just as lost as we are, and end up finding a way out together.
This song “Strange Comfort” is a look into this aspect of life and talks about how we are lost, and that we find a home and a place in being lost, but that there is a way out to get somewhere in life and that things can work out if we keep working towards that. There is more to life than what we know and what we think, and we just have to find a way to look at it. It’s a slow process, but if we work through it and actually make an effort to do something, we can actually make a difference. We have to learn to live one day at a time, learn from our mistakes and from the choices we have made to understand what it is we are doing and why. Sometimes there are no answer; things just happen and we have to learn to accept that fact in order to come to grip with our reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSe_Jz0KhbY- Music Video
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/colormorale/strangecomfort.html- Lyrics
