Caught Off Guard by Nostalgia

The weekend is almost here again, and this time, I’m more than ready to welcome it. Not because I have anything exciting planned, but because I desperately need the break. This entire week wrung me out like damp cloth, all the back and forth, the waiting in long queues, over-explaining, the moving from office to office just to fix an error my dad didn’t even cause. He’s getting older, and he’s not very educated, so banking complications feel like a foreign language to him. I had to go with him, not just to support him, but to help translate everything into simpler words the bankers were too busy to break down. And even after explaining the same thing over and over, he still asked questions, the same ones, with the same confused expression. I was tired, frustrated even, but I couldn’t blame him. Age does that. Confusion does that. Life does that.

Actually, the real fault lies with the agent who practically manipulated him into opening that account in the first place and conveniently disappeared when it was time to fix the mess. So I had to play the courier for other people’s carelessness, dragging my body and my patience through it all. My body is tired, but I think my spirit feels even more exhausted.

Last night, I was watching Family Guy, half-distracted, half-existing, when Peter Griffin suddenly broke into Billy Ocean’s Suddenly. It was a little funny obviously because it’s Peter Griffin, doing his own thing for his silly reasons but then along the line, the song itself held me. I guess soulfulness has a way of slipping into your chest without asking permission. Before I knew it, I shazammed the song, got the title, then paused the episode and went searching for the original on Youtube. One click later and there I was, listening to Billy’s voice like it was something I had always known but never fully heard.

That’s the thing about the song though that I think is suitable for the coming weekend. It’s tender and warm. It’s like a soft hand placed gently on the back of your mind that reminds you that simple yet beautiful things still exist. I found a certain peace in those lyrics and it didn’t even try too hard to get me. At this point I think the 80s had the best classic and soulful ballads. Can’t remember any artist of my time coming up with such.

Well, the song which I left on repeat till my Mp3 bluetooth speaker’s battery died left me wondering how many beautiful things pass through our lives unnoticed? How many songs we must have heard but never really listened to? How many small moments brush against us waiting to be cherished, but we are too distracted, too stressed, too busy surviving the week to take notice?

We always look for the extraordinary, forgetting that sometimes the extraordinary hides inside the ordinary, almost like my experience, finding a soulful ballad inside a cartoon joke.