Dreaming with a broken heart

"See the thing is no one really knows what they have till its gone, and these things are so complicated, I mean we wake up one day and things are not the same..."

I saw the above quote as a response on a lyrics page for this song. I can't fully express the understanding and connection I feel with that statement in regard to life, but it's strong. It is something that I have realized before and tried to explain to a few others, but never this concise.

Sometimes it's not even waking up and realizing it. It's sitting at a stop light and having the realization that nothing and everything has changed. It's knowing that someone you love is dying. It's the moment you receive news that someone you cared about has unexpectedly died and they have been dead for hours and you didn't even know it. It's that moment you fully realize there are no guarantees in life and anything can happen at anytime - including your own mortality.

I guess the longer I live, the more I realize things have been the same since our grandparents were our age. The same problems with love and marriage. The same problems with kids and teenagers. The same problems with politics and taxes.

Life is interwoven with pain and happiness. We (or at least I always have) seem to think that everything is constantly evolving and the problems we have now are so different than anytime before.

Sometimes I wonder how much control we really have over our own fate. Sometimes it seems like you step off the tracks of one train and on to the tracks of another. Eventually one of these trains is going to hit us.

The worst of it is when you can see the train coming and no matter how hard you try to get off the tracks, all you can do is run down them, away from a train that's moving 5 times faster than you can run.

Don't be alarmed, I'm not relating to anything in particular here. Just past observations/realizations.

Anyway, this is a really good song. John Mayer is an awesome writer and musician.