inquiring life

Awake My Soul: An Interpretation

One of the things I’d like to do on this blog from time to time is reflect on songs that, for one reason or another, have stuck with me over the years. I enjoy sitting with a song and exploring what it might mean – not just the meaning that the songwriter intended, but what it means to me personally. As I touched on in my Poetry Without a Poet post, I’m not aiming to find the One True Meaning of any given song. I’m not here to tell you what a song should mean to you. But I hope that by sharing what it’s meant to me, it might enrich your own understanding – adding one more thread to the tapestry of meaning we all bring to the music we love.

🎵 Music Interpretation Reminder 🎵
As I touched on in Poetry Without a Poet, art often carries meanings beyond what the artist intended. I’m not searching for the “One True Meaning” of any song. Instead, my hope is that this interpretation adds another layer to the meaning and beauty that this music already holds.

“Awake My Soul” is a track by the British folk-rock band Mumford & Sons, released in 2009 on their debut album Sigh No More. The band quickly became known for their rich, folksy sound, paired with lyrics that explore raw emotional themes with spiritual undertones. While not a religious band, many of their lyrics tap into questions of identity, love, purpose, and grace. They often use language that feels a bit religious in tone – which makes sense given that lead singer Marcus Mumford grew up in a home where both parents were leaders in the Association of Vineyard Churches. “Awake My Soul” has always stood out to me (since I first heard it back in college) as one of their more reflective songs, weaving together themes of longing, vulnerability, and transformation in just a few verses.

If you haven’t heard it in a while (or ever), I encourage you to listen to the track below with fresh ears. After that, I’ll dive into exploring the lyrics more closely.

What is the Singularity?

In recent years – first in science fiction, and now increasingly in tech headlines – a particular word has begun to surface more and more often: Singularity.

Originally, this term was used by mathematicians (describing points where equations break down) and physicists (most famously, when discussing black holes). But today, if you’re hearing it in conversations about technology, it likely means something else – generally referring to computing power, artificial intelligence, and exponential change.

The recent leaps in AI may just seem like new tools for making quick work of essays or generating memes. They are much more than that, though – they mark the beginning of a profound shift that will, sooner or later, ripple through every part of our lives. It’s worth taking a few minutes now to explore what the Singularity actually is, what it could mean for us, and how we might begin to prepare for it.

Doomscrolling and the Global Shallows

The phrase “doomscrolling”, which was first popularized during the COVID pandemic, describes a behavior pattern that goes back even further than that – at least to the dawn of social media. If you’ve ever found yourself scrolling your Facebook timeline for the fifth time in an hour, re-reading the same (often negative) posts because your brain is hooked on checking for a tiny drip of new information, you’ve participated in the phenomenon. It’s closely tied to FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), a term coined in 2004 just as the internet was really finding its place in the hearts and minds of people around the world.

What’s changed in recent years is the sheer scale of it. Our ancestors might have worried about their town, their family, their crops. We, on the other hand, are handed an endless feed of every war, every disaster, every outrage – filtered through algorithms designed to keep us hooked. There’s a strange social pressure to stay informed about everything, as if not knowing about a faraway tragedy makes us complicit or self-absorbed. But is this constant exposure actually increasing our depth of compassion – or stretching it too thin to be useful, at the expense of our spiritual and mental health? When everything feels urgent, it’s hard to tell what actually deserves our attention. Our desire to stay deeply informed about the world can end up making our empathy surprisingly shallow.

Poetry Without a Poet

Anytime I encounter art – whether it be poetry, music, a novel, etc. – I like to try to understand the intent of the artist. They carefully crafted this work, so I should put forth the effort to receive it as they intended, right? While I still think that is a valuable exercise, it may also be that much of the experienced beauty in art isn’t created solely by the artist – not all of it deliberately, at least. C.S. Lewis captured this idea when he wrote the following in The Personal Heresy:

Hello world!

Just testing out the blog – howdy!

public class InquiringLife {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Thought thought = new Thought("Hello, World");
        thought.contemplate();
    }
}

class Thought {
    private final String message;

    public Thought(String message) {
        this.message = message;
    }

    public void contemplate() {
        // TODO: build out observation, reflection, & integration functionality
    }
}