Some Nights

          The song Some Nights by Fun. is one of my favorite songs. The first few times I heard it were at Bar/Bat Mitzfahs, and I immediately thought it was a catchy, soulful song. The more I heard it, the more I understood. It was one of those songs that I would find myself humming, but I wouldn't remember what it was. It inexplicably reached down into my soul and spoke to it, preached even; it stuck in my head without being annoying or repetitive. Now that I have heard it probably a few dozen times by now, I can tell you what I believe the message is: we all have our regrets and worries, but we must learn to accept them and move on.

          I thought that the message was to forgive and forget because of a number of quotes that sum up to just that if you read between the lines. The first is "Some nights I wish that my lips could build a castle, Some nights I wish they'd just fall off". This is said early on, and my interpretation is that is means that we can all have those days (or nights, in this case) where we love life, and feel great, and just want to go out and have fun and see the world. Then we have other nights where we feel useless and weak; we feel alone and pessimistic to the world, and even ourselves. But later on in the song, only a few lines later, he says: "But I still wake up, I still see your ghost". The waking up part tells me that, after a rough night, he'll still wake up and know that it's a fresh new day, full of opportunity. But the ghost part symbolizes a regret or feeling of shame (guilty conscience maybe?) that stays with him. It's this whole idea of looking forward to the future without forgetting your past.

          That idea is something that I believe everybody can learn from. I can learn from it because in my past, my family has gone through some troubling times. I have tried to move on from it, and while it took me more years than I'd like to admit, I have gotten to a place where I still think about it, but I don't let the storm clouds of my past ruin my future of bright, sunny skies. Don't let it rain on your parade! People (teenagers, parents, children, party animals, and criminals alike) can learn from this because everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has times when they would rather stay in bed and sleep it away. But we have to take a deep breath and learn from our mistakes so we don't make them again. Humanity as a whole can learn from this because of war. War is something most people frown upon, yet humanity clearly hasn't had enough experience with it to know we can work out our problems without bloodshed. Y'know, "Make Peace, Not War"? John Lennon's song "Imagine"? Every history book ever? Why can't we learn from them? The mistakes of the past should not be remade in the future. We must learn from them and move on.