As I drove back from our quick walkabout at Bryce Canyon’s Sunset Peak and the final hooray that concluded my participation in the big Southern Utah family reunion, I felt a jolt of individuality and epinephrine. I cranked up the music, bought my favorite mountain dew, and fueled the tank for the riveting drive home in my trusty Jetta. The “music shuffle angels” made me feel that a bigger force had curated my road trip’s playlist, and had actually understood the happenings of the last week.
Thinking back to my computer science days I remembered programming a random number generator, which can be a building block for playlist shufflers. Those music-shuffling-angles suddenly become pieces of code in my head, and the magic disappears, leaving me to question the meaning I had ascribed to past experiences in which I felt a song that came on shuffle was an answer to prayer. I thanked my luck, but still wished I could attribute the perfectly ordered music selection to something beyond — to something omniscient. I hoped and hope to be proven wrong.
Feelings of nostalgia had hit already, but not from the trip. The feelings seemed to come from beyond the grave, like I could feel a sense of awe my grandparents must have felt at the sight of this canyon’s crimson-colored hoodoos.
I felt divided. Here I was in the midst of what I wanted to be musical revelation, headed back to my 10x15 office in which I would watch price tickers and charts, stacking up probabilities to make a profit on the swings of speculation. I sought meaning at every bend in the road, and yearned for a greater purpose in something that I also understood using reason.
I marveled at the sculpted landscape and almost felt unworthy of being in such a scene without fully embracing and appreciating it. I felt I owed it a reverence I was incapable of giving. Every mountain deserved a climb and every “car commercial turn” an audible “whoohoo!”. Would my study of this canyon change the magical canyon-sculpting angels I pictured in my head into basic processes of erosion and weathering? (Since giving this some thought, I think that as we learn more about something our appreciation and wonder for it actually expands, and that gives me so much hope in my quest for knowledge and meaning.)
I was struck in straight-faced inclination, heading back to my personally crafted humdrum routine. “What can I take from this?” I thought. You see, I’ve always felt an impulsive need to “take away” something from every event or learning experience I go through — an impulse I believe I adopted from daily scripture study in adolescence. You know, you read a few verses from scripture and think “how can I apply this to my life?”
So I clicked “shuffle all”, handing over my speakers’ fate to the “music shuffle angles.” Each song built off of the last, culminating in a duo performed by a long-forgotten favorite song from last year and the beauty of a man-made lookout spot.
I wondered what the nexus of unexplainable meaning and logical certainty would look like. Songs came and went, and I ascribed meaning to their order of appearance, toying with the idea of supernatural control in spite of the explainable shuffle algorithm.
It’s easy to ascribe magic to the things we do not understand. I hope to continue to find some kind of transcendental meaning of all things even as I increase my knowledge of how the world really operates. I feel deeply that there is something deeper to life that we’ll never be able to grasp. Maybe that’s what drives us. It sure drives me.