What's your song?

Mon, Jun 9, 2025

The long hot bake of May has been replaced by the dreichness of June. Heavy rain pounds the ground from a leaden sky and the hills are cloaked in grey and scoured by cold winds that only the other day dropped new snow on the early summer summits.

In a break in the weather I was running my second 10K of the week, an off-road along wet, slippy, rocky, boggy track in a lesser known part of Skye with an overall ascent of 210m. I’m almost always alone on this run which I enjoy and on the steep pull up one of the hills my old brain started singing to itself lyrics from one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard.

As age encroaches, life becomes about keeping mind and body in balance. Not too much of one while starving the other of what it needs to be itself. I can find myself sitting for hours creating electronics and programming microcontrollers as I design and build my solar powered weather station, forgetting that body needs attention too. It soon reminds me and off I go into the mountains. Increasingly these days on solitary runs. Equally, mind needs food too and I’ve just completed my OU B1 German course. Have to keep them both happy and it seemed a good thiing to do.

That’s the thing about learning a new language. Gaelic has a saying:

cha tig an aois leis fhein - old age never comes itself

and similarly, a new language never comes itself. It’s a key to a new world you never knew existed. New ways of seeing, new knowledge, wisdom and philosophy. As I rythmically plodded, step by step by step, relentlessly pushing down and springing up, the top of the long rise getting nearer and nearer my mind was singing to itself some of the lyrics from the song that gives this post its title and it felt, for a while, what it was like to be a happy little mind.

The song is written almost like a sonnet, to a beautiful melody, with a “turn”, the volta, just before the final chorus. A message to look to yourself, decide who you are and take that self-knowledge out into the world. You’re the only one and as the song says:

das Universum macht nie eine Kopie - the universe never makes a copy

and when it creates you,

dass es Fehler gar nicht gibt - that there’s no such thing as a mistake

The song is in my favourite format. “Black and white” music. A beautiful voice and a piano. Nothing more. The volta is haunting.

Und was brennt dir auf deiner Seele?
Warum bist du eigentlich hier?
Warum du und niemand anders?
Welches Lied kommt nur von dir?

What sets your soul on fire?
Why are you actually here?
Why you and no-one else?
Which song comes only from you?

It sounds so much more beautiful in the original German but the messge is simple, universal and life-changing for a troubled soul.

It’s about following your instinct through life. Look at hierarchies and comparisons and just walk away. That inner voice you’re born with says you are perfect and enough as you are. There are stories in you that want to come out and how you live your life is your applause for being alive in this wonderful world. Sometimes people sing their life-song with you, sometimes you’re left alone but you’re never lonely as you always have your own melody.

Eigene melodie, your own melody. It’s the part of you that gets you through the dark times in your life. Yes, sometimes people will sing theirs’ with you, sometimes they won’t. Sometimes it will feel like it’s the world and you, alone. But your eigene melodie will get you through as it reminds you that you are, perfect and enough, just as you are.

As I ran back along the rough track, high up through heather moorland, through a maze of mossed rocks under a thick grey sky, my old friend Blaven and her collection of moody weather beaten sky-scraping jagged ridges ghosted from the storm clouds charging in from the Atlantic and in answer to that question, welches Lied kommt nur von dir, I thought, this is it. This is my life-song. A life spent in mountains. Every day, finding a new song to sing. Finding a new, beautiful thing about the world to celebrate. In the gathering darkness of war on life, war on climate, war on the existence of beauty, in the closing words of the song,

Geh und finde jeden Tag ein neues Lied

every day, go and find a new song.