It’s A Great Day to Be Alive

By Clay Hipp

To love the day, shadows and all

Willamette Golds, 2026, Erin Hanson, American

Last week I featured Darrell Scott on Words That Sing. His songwriting is terribly accomplished — complete, musically and lyrically — and his body of work takes time to explore. I have seen him live regularly. One time was very special.

He was playing in a small concert room at Merlefest. As you may know, thousands attend every year, and if a well-known artist is performing in a limited space, one had better get there before the doors close. I failed. A friend and I stood in the hall, listening through a side door that someone was holding open — probably against the rules. Not unusually, he was finishing his set with one of his most celebratory pieces.

He lets the listener know the theme right away, in a chorus repeated throughout:

“And it’s a great day to be alive,

I know the sun’s still shinin’; when I close my eyes,

There’s some hard times in the neighborhood,

But why can’t every day be just this good?”

When you hear it played and sung, the energy and emotion of the singer comes through to the listener in a very powerful way. It is, for me, impossible not to be moved. But behind the celebration is a dose of reality. And yet, and yet. . . . The question asked of each of us is inescapable.

Do you have an answering call?

I used this song for years with my undergraduate classes — law classes! How in the hell, you might say? Well, I kept it in waiting for just the right moment.

Semesters are long, and no matter how stimulating the subject matter, or how creatively presented by the lecturer, attention and energy diminish. Sometimes, to match the mood — returning from spring break, or facing exams and paper deadlines in the last week of classes — I would say, "All right, close your notebooks. It's time for a sing-along." I would crank up the speakers and watch the faces as they looked at each other or shrugged their shoulders.

At the end of each verse, I would raise my hand like a conductor and say, "Here is your part." As I sang along, almost no one joined in. But with each verse, a brave one or two came in, to the amusement of their peers. As the chorus played itself out, the atmosphere had changed significantly. If you wish to know how it truly went down, you will have to talk with some former students. I will say that over the years a positive remark or two showed up in my evaluations — no outright "pans."

After playing and conducting, and depending on the perceived mood, I usually offered a short soliloquy urging them to take the song to heart. Listen to it or hum it, I told them, depending on how you're feeling — celebratory, or in need of a lift and with an expectation: that you always to greet me around campus with some reference to the message…..and a smile.

But I must tell you the rest of the song. It holds something very important, very human.

Deep into it — after the humor and surprise — one finds this:

“Sometimes it’s lonely,

Sometimes it’s only me,

And the shadows that fill this room.

Sometimes I’m fallin’;

Desperately callin’;

Howlin’ at the moon”

While these lines seem to take us far away from where the title leads, it is actually right here that Scott's kernel of truth is revealed:

A great day to be alive is not a day without shadows. It is a day lived wide awake to all of it.

Scott is no Pollyanna. He knows those lonely rooms intimately — the shadows, the falling, the desperate calling. And yet I think it is in these liminal spaces, where light and dark meet, that we begin to wake up to the beauty of being alive.

It reminds me of an old phrase — amor fati, the love of one's fate. It is attributed to Nietzsche, though the sentiment reaches back through the Stoics to Marcus Aurelius, who counseled us to accept — even to welcome — whatever the universe hands down. That is the thread they share across the centuries: an idea meant to help us meet whatever life throws our way by embracing all of it as part of the cosmic dance of existence, where mystery and reality meet in the whole of human experience.

It is something another artist, Don McLean, encapsulates so brilliantly in a verse of "Crossroads":

But there's no need for turning back '

Cause all roads lead to where I stand

And I believe I'll walk them all

No matter what I may have planned

This is not resignation, nor gritted teeth against the future, but something nearer to an embrace: the willingness to take a life whole, light and shadow both, and call them not just good, but necessary. Nietzsche writes, "I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful."

Not the light in spite of the dark, and not the dark merely softened by the light, but the two held together in a kind of mystical balance — because that balance is the very thing that makes us alive. To understand joy, we must know pain. Yet these are not obstacles to the mystery of being here. They are the mystery.

This is the real lesson I wanted to hand my students the day I made them close their notebooks and asked them to sing along: that we only grow when we are challenged, that we only come alive when something shakes us loose from the doldrums of mere existence — and music does this better than nearly anything — into the full, aching fact of being here.

So when the song asks its question, I hope you have an answering call. Not because every day is good, but because you've decided, shadows and all, to love the one you're living.