Reap What You Sow (Jackpot January #21)

You ever worry that you’ve let the wrong people in?

My mind is so fickle and really only lives in the present. When I’m happy, it feels like my joy stretches all the way through the past and future, that even dark moments were just small shadows cast by an eternal midday sun overhead. When I feel lonely, it’s as if I’ve only ever been lonely, as if the secret nature of things has come to light, like the dirt under a shiny stone.

Most of the time I’m mostly at peace. But when a few misunderstandings and silences happen in the same day, it’s hard for my feelings not to draw conclusions. In the happy mode, the world is full of joy, but I don’t feel grateful because it just is. In the lonely mode, the world is barren so I don’t resent the loneliness. Loneliness is the total of everything.

Lou Reed’s Perfect Days is a song I can listen to in any mood. The final lines give it this ambivalent quality: ‘You’re gonna reap just what you sow.’ It’s an intense and menacing line to end on, but it adds a layer of depth. The track is already nuanced and precarious, with lines like, ‘You just keep me hanging on’ and Reed’s reference to feeling like ‘someone else, someone good.’

The idea that you reap what you sow is still alive and well. People now talk of how ‘negative people attract negative energy’ just as ‘hurt people hurt people.’ In the context of the song, the idiom describes a fundamental psychological reality. All these lyrics about anxious self-perception frame the line as a final reminder that nothing lasts, neither goodness nor badness. If the speaker truly believes he is not someone good, then the perfect day is a threat.

Just as for me happy and lonely days stretch out in parallel ways, Reed’s joy feels like a consequence, like something he earned. But it goes beyond feeling; it does not ‘feel like’ a perfect day, it is one. Despite its perfection, the day itself is always subject to change. So it’s not just on our heads, it’s a true experiential feature of the world. A bad day makes the world bad to us.

And I love this idea. It doesn’t blame people for how a situation made them feel. No, it’s the situation’s fault. Put the world on trial or give it a medal according to our individual whims, like for like.

We are not mules caught up in one big nuanced world that we’re too stubborn to navigate. Rather, each of us walk around, our own separate world buzzing around our heads, and try our best to break through the way it treats us so we can talk to each other.