Sunscreen

There's a song I really enjoy, "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)" by Baz Luhrman.  I've had a lyric that has been stuck in my mind for a few days now.  It gets stuck quite regularly:

Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't.
Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't.
Maybe you'll divorce at 40.
Maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary.
Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either.
Your choices are half chance,
so are everybody else's.

It was hard for me to completely understand this last couplet, but it runs through my head often.
And some days I like the meaning more than others.

I didn't choose my parents, or what city or state we lived in, or what house we lived in.  I didn't choose what clothes I would wear before I starting buying my own clothes.  I didn't choose what I ate most of the time, it was just laid out for me by my parents.  I didn't choose which room in the house was going to be my room.  I didn't choose the way my parents loved me.  I didn't choose who went to school with me.  But I made choices based on all those things that were forced on me.  If I could alter things from being the way that they are, I would make different choices.  But I cannot.

Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's.

I guess we all do the best with what we're given.  And we strive to make it as equal for everybody as possible in a world that is designed to be unequal.  Is it fair that the mountains are taller than the sea?  It's almost a meaningless question, but it has as much meaning as asking questions we ask all the time-- if it's fair that some people are taller than others, that some people are born into affluence, that some people have better skin or more hair or a nicer quality speaking voice or bigger boobs or can eat more candy without getting fat or find it more difficult to walk?  It's just the way things are.  We were born into a set of randomly selected circumstances that we are allowed to make choices about.  It was chance that my future wife and I went to the same high school.  And there's no way of knowing for certain that we wouldn't have met elsewhere if we hadn't gone to the same high school because that's not how it happened.  We met in high school, we fell in love in high school, and that was half chance.

I still don't really know what that means to me.  It feels simultaneously deep and meaningless.  It feels like it should help me live life better, but I'm not sure that it does.  It feels like it should help me relax when I find myself in situations that are uncomfortable, but I don't think it does.  I'm still in that uncomfortable situation.  And then, as I'm about to throw it away as meaningless crap that some author wrote in order to sell magazines, I hold on to it because I'm not ready to discount it as worthless.  There's something in it that is useful.

Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's.


Wish I knew what that use was.