is that you’re hardwired to find all kinds of irrational shit inexplicably moving.
I found a music compilation called Fire in My Bones a few months ago, and have been clutching my heart and absorbing it in gulps ever since. The above song is the highlight for me, and I get an emotional pinch from it that I know I wouldn’t get if the song was about Allah, or reincarnation, or stress-testing, or any of the other shibboleths I could have been raised in the shadows of if my mom wasn’t a Presbyterian minister.
It’s the same pinch I got when Barack Obama was elected, the neon part of your brain that thinks the values you were raised with are self-evidently right, and why won’t the rest of the world just come around already? The song probably sounds like gibberish to anyone not raised in my particular household. And sigh, The Giving Tree probably isn’t the most moving story ever told. And there are definitely better movies than Chariots of Fire. I know all these things. I just don’t always feel them.
But no matter how loud I think at the little kid endlessly spinning around in the snowglobe of my brain, sometimes he still wins.