“Nothings going change my world”
I wonder what John Lennon meant when he wrote those words. By all accounts he was lying in bed with his first wife sometime in 1967 and he was particularly annoyed by what he perceived to be her constantly going on about something and the words felt like they kept flowing into his mind long after she had gone to sleep. He went downstairs and decided to create a cosmic poem that, on waking the following morning, he completely forgot about. He has later described this as one of the best songs he ever wrote.
Early on in my relationship with my wife when we had the time to sit and listen to records and debate their meaning (something she was always better at than me, some things never change in my world) and we disagreed on our enjoyment and appreciation of this particular song. Anne hated it. “How could anyone possibly hold this view?” she’d ask me and at the time I was able to defend Lennon though for the life of me I have no idea how. I certainly don’t think that way now.
I am currently writing a book on identity and one of the areas I briefly explore is how our world is constantly changing. This is in both a global and personal sense. What’s more it is a positive thing, an essential part of our development is the acceptance of change and the affect that has on us. We are constantly changing beings in an constantly changing environment. We resist change from time to time, we crave a degree of certainty and so we place a stick in the ground and hang onto it. Eventually we realise that the stick is in the wrong place or we let go of it at some point but we will still retrieve it and place it somewhere else.
So was Lennon just plain wrong? I suspect that the refrain was written to describe what he felt his wife’s view of the world was or perhaps, like most of the other words in the song, it just sounded good.
Imagine that…