Follow My Feet

I love this song, because it paints a solid picture of the struggle of trying to make choices regarding your own existence without using too many words.

The song is set up with a confrontation with the Devil, the reckoning of trying to decide what kind of person we're going to be, identity and ego, and all the things to consider to continually determine this (the devil is in the details, they say). It starts with a somewhat dark, yet freeing admonition that regardless of what choice you make, it's going to be a learning experience (as anything tangible cannot be retained past death).

The chorus outlines the lessons that each path has to learn: The "high road", the ethical life, is one where your actions prevent you from falling into peril (steady) but you need to consistently put forth effort to progress (steep). The "low road" is the emotionally reactive life, one where you aren't really using your brain too much to determine the course of your life (easy) but you live it from a very emotionally vulnerable place (deep) since you don't have as much control. The chorus ends with "I guess I'll follow my feet", which I'll bring up again shortly.

Now, the two other verses are very interesting, because they show how two completely different people can have the same reasoning that leads to different results. The first person is self-serving, and sees other people only as competition to the resources he accumulates to feel safe. The second person is oriented towards service to others, and sees that if there is suffering in the world, it is up to individual people to make an effort to stop it. They both arrive at this same conclusion by the same rationale: "If I don't, then who?"

The tag line of the song, the final verse of the chorus, is a very subtle admonition, to accept that which paths you take in life are not a matter of right or wrong, but a matter simply of what happens in your life. The most real and immediate thing available to you is the present moment, and if you spend all your time looking in the distance trying to figure out how to spend the present moment, you'll miss it.

Sometimes it's better to not look so far in the distance, and just look somewhere close, like right where you're walking. This is the way we get to experience our lives, although there are many distinctions we could make.