And, how it became the perfect song for Jack and Pauline from Shrugging.
Around the time my wife Melanie and I were stepping away from our careers and preparing to sell our house to become rockstars with my best friend, Tim (spoiler—we didn’t), I fell in love with the album, A Sudden Rush of Blood to the Head, by Coldplay. And in particular, what I consider their magnum opus, “The Scientist.”
This song ended up becoming emotionally attached to not one, but two distinct and important parts of my life.
The first time was when it happened to start playing on a wintry afternoon in 2003 while I was packing up my mother’s 12-service China set in my living room. The delicate floral-pattered porcelain plates, bowls, cups and saucers had formalized our family’s Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter dinners for probably 40 years, accompanied by the complete 70-piece silverware set that nestled in the red velvet pockets of its battered but ornate wooden chest.
As my siblings aged and our family spread out and started their own families, holiday gatherings with everyone slowly came to an end, so the set was packed away. When my parents decided to downsize and move into a very nice double-wide mobile home in what was then a cozy little community called Villa Diane, I was shocked to find the entire China set clumsily packed in boxes and awaiting auction.
“What are you doing?” I cried. “You’re not selling the China…?”
My mother shrugged. “There’s no room for it in the mobile home. We never bring it out anymore anyway.”
“But that’s a family heirloom! You can’t just sell it.”
“Well, who would want it?”
I was dumbfounded. That set had been treasured by her, proudly displayed in a beautiful hutch in the old dining room of their previous home. Now, she was acting like it was cheap Corning ware.
“We’re taking it,” I said, and started to grab the first box.
“But you’re in an apartment. You have no room for it.”
“We’ll have a house one day. We’ll store it until then. This is NOT leaving the family.”
So Melanie and I took all three densely-packed boxes of newspaper-wrapped China. We carefully moved them from our small Altoona townhouse to our first mobile home (five lots up from my parents in the same park), and then finally to our first actual house in Eleva, Wisconsin.
Melanie and I had always planned to one day find the perfect corner hutch to display the China. In the meantime, we had mounted shelves in our kitchen to display individual pieces. Bringing out that China for the first time after so many years moving those boxes from one storage to another felt like we had finally, truly achieved something—even more so than the house itself.
Four years later, in our early 30s and well into our careers, we decided to preempt our midlife crises. We quit our jobs to become a real, full-time gigging band instead of the experimental studio band that had been little more than an expensive hobby for the past fifteen years. That’s how I found myself on my couch in my living room, boxing up that same China set in preparation for our own downsizing move.
But this time, the China wasn’t coming with us.
Come spring of 2004, Tim, Melanie and I would end up renting a 110-year-old farm house in Eau Claire that sat at the dead end of West Folsom overlooking Interstate 94. Melanie and I would have a 100 square foot room to ourselves, Tim the same, and the rest would be band space. But for the time-being, sitting on the couch on a gray, wintry day, the future was unknown. I just knew that, soon, our lives would be very different.
I meticulously packed up the China so it would survive an 1,800-mile journey via UPS to my sister in Seattle. Sadly, our future hutch in some future dining room that would display our Peters’ heritage had been usurped by the call to an artistic life of music and the craving for an audience to share our music with.
I wasn’t really feeling any emotion—more focused on building my three-foot cubed double-walled and duct-taped monstrosity of a box that my sister would later complain took her half a day to open and unpack (but, nothing broken!). That’s when Coldplay’s “The Scientist” filled the room. I was only half-paying attention until the chorus:
Nobody said it was easy
It's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard
Oh, take me back to the start
Suddenly, the experience became extremely melancholy. The full weight of what we were giving up in pursuit of some out-of-reach brass ring enveloped me. It wasn’t just the China we were parting with, but everything we had made for ourselves up to that point—everything that we thought had defined us.
Later in the song, Chris Martin sings:
Running in circles, chasing our tails
Coming back as we are
I remember that I had to stop what I was doing for a moment, overwhelmed for perhaps the first time at the magnitude of what we were about to do. Wondering if we were making a huge mistake.
Looking back now as I write this, I recognize a connection between me on that couch packing up the China, and my mother shrugging away the China and discarding it to the auction pile. She never wanted to sell the house. She didn’t want to move into that mobile home. My father made that decision because he was afraid of dying and leaving my mother with nothing. He hadn’t realized that, despite his concern and love for her leading him to that decision, he was actually taking away from her more than he could ever leave her.
It hurt her too much to lose her China and everything it represented, so she tried to strip it of all emotional value.
For me, whenever I hear “The Scientist,” I’m transported back to that couch and preparing for the unknown while giving up so much of what we had known and what we were.
Fast forward about four years, the band running out of steam in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I’m working on the final drafts of Shrugging (at that time, still titled, Shrugging Existence). On Pandora, “The Scientist” started to play.
*** Warning, here there be spoilers ***
I was editing the climactic chapters, when Jack returns by bus to see Pauline one last time. He’s concerned for her, worried he has irrevocably harmed her, and wants to apologize and tell her everything will be okay. It’s an absurd and pointless gesture because he plans to end all existence in a few days, but he can’t stomach Pauline's last moments being filled with regret over—and resentment for—him.
It’s a heartbreaking encounter in a cemetery where he learns her big secret, the final mystery to Pauline she had been laying clues about throughout their interactions. Jack finds out that, in essence, Pauline has already applied her own version of the Shrug in her past, that she is still haunted by it, and that they are more alike than he knew. She warns him of the consequences of using his Shrug, but at that point, he doesn’t heed her words and leaves her.
These lyrics were playing while I edited that section:
Come up to meet you, tell you I'm sorry
You don't know how lovely you are
I had to find you, tell you I need you
Tell you I set you apart
Tell me your secrets and ask me your questions
Oh, let's go back to the start
Running in circles, coming up tails
Heads on a science apart
From that point on, that song took ownership of Jack and Pauline. Not just conveying their final meeting, but identifying their conflicting beliefs—her faith and his science.
When Jack returns home and takes the pills that will end his life, destroy the Shrug and save the world, he is resigned, but also destroys his apartment in an emotional fit of rage before lying down for what he thinks will be his oblivion.
These lyrics so perfectly convey everything that was going through his head in that moment—his thoughts and regrets over Pauline and all his searching of science and faith to try and figure out what his purpose was:
I was just guessing at numbers and figures
Pulling the puzzles apart
Questions of science, science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart
But tell me you love me, come back and haunt me
Oh and I rush to the start
Running in circles, chasing our tails
Coming back as we are
Nobody said it was easy
Oh, it's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be so hard
I'm going back to the start
This song has become such an emotional tidal wave for me, about loss and regret, of difficult decisions, but also of life’s uncertainty. It suggests the possibility of returning to where you began, but with crucial—often painful, sometimes wonderful—experiences that change your perceptions and force you to reassess what is truly valuable and important…
…and to perhaps be a little less fearful of change, despite any regret.
For my mother, I know there was regret, but it didn't last, and in the end, she returned closer to her start—to family in Madison and Milwaukee—and had some of her best years before her health failed her.
Nobody told us it would be easy when we pursued the band, and it was a shame for us to part—just as Jack and Pauline’s parting was bittersweet. But we returned to the start, and over time, I think we're the better for it, no matter the difficulties and regret.
Jack and Pauline, meanwhile? Well, that’s another story.
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