My favorite non-pop John Mayer song (basically only songs from his newest album, Continuum) is Gravity. Aside from being an avid fan of Mayer and his perfection of a Strat tone in Gravity, I find this song important because of Mayer's application of this abstract scientific principle of a force that is continuously pulling us towards the Earth's core to our everyday lives.
If plotted on a coordinate plane, life would most likely be illustrated as a roller coaster (or sine/cosine graph for the nerds) with its highest of heights and lowest of lows. Perhaps the discouraging aspect of visualizing life this way is realizing that no matter how high you might go on the scale of happiness in life, there is that inevitable downward slope, whether it be steep or gradual. This wrung of grace that you might be gladly standing on today might easily crumble into nothing tomorrow.
So why would I spend time blogging about a seemingly dreary song outlining the inevitability of Gravity weighing us down? It is because of the lyrics at the end of the song where Mayer repeats the request, "keep me where the light is." Ever since I first heard this song, I could only listen and sing along to it as a prayer asking to truly stay safely seated on the maximum vertex of life's graph.
When I enter my modes of introspection I realize every time that I spend too much time worrying about these points of life where the graph levels off near the bottom. Where it goes much below the x-axis and into the negative y-values. But through this song I am reminded that though there is that downward slope, there is also the increasing slant which I am able to enjoy and relish in soon to come.
This is probably my favorite thing that I've read all day, mostly just because I love that you're comparing life to graphs. You also manage to be uplifting and inspirational at the same time. Props.
I AGREE!
I LOVEEEEE when you said "If plotted on a coordinate plane, life would most likely be illustrated as a roller coaster (or sine/cosine graph for the nerds)"
haha that has to be the best thing i've read all day!
and i love sin and cos graphs! so this is really cool!
I can agree, life is quite like a sin/cosine graph. More like sin because it starts at the origin (or is that cosine) rather than at -1. However, why commit your life to that... the only reason that life becomes so depressing to think about is that we are not only fully aware of our mortality, we surround our lives with it. Why can't we be like a tangent graph? (although i think we would have to be reborn a bunch of times for that to work) or a something squared graph where we don't stop going up.
both pessimists and optimists die, but at least optimists get to be happier
...that sin is the one that starts at the origin. Maaybe...