Love the Life You Live: What Can You Build Your Life on in a Disoriented World?

Love the Life You Live. Lead the Life You Love: A Chorus That Turns Back on Itself

The phrase is almost too beautiful. We could hear it as a self-help slogan, an invitation to seize the day, an elegant way of saying: enjoy life. But let us look more closely. In the second line, Benjamin does not say: Live the life you love. He says: Lead the life you love. One word changes. And that word changes everything.

Live describes a condition. Lead names an action. Life is given to us. How we inhabit it depends on us. Nor does Benjamin say you will or you must. He continues with you should lead the life you love. This is neither a prophecy nor an order. It is a moral invitation.

The chorus does not place two independent imperatives side by side. It describes a dynamic. Loving life allows us to direct it; directing it allows us to love it more. The whole song explores what can still provide direction when familiar reference points have collapsed. Benjamin never separates gratitude from responsibility. We cannot lead a life we reject. And the more we lead it, the more we can love it.

But leading requires a sense of direction. It is precisely this direction that the song sets out to recover.

Why Has the World Lost Its Bearings?

The song begins with a diagnosis. Before suggesting a direction, Benjamin shows why that direction has been lost. This is a recurring feature of his writing: first he invites us to look, then he describes, and only afterwards does he offer guidance.

World is in trouble. Armageddon shall show her face upon creation.

In Rastafari spirituality, Armageddon does not primarily mean the end of the world. The Greek word apocalypse means revelation. Armageddon is the site of the final battle, but above all, the moment when the true face of things is revealed. The song is therefore not announcing a future catastrophe. It asserts that this unveiling is already underway.

Goodness and mercy driven from the minds of the people. Lamentation.

The reference is precise. Psalm 23 promised: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. Here, by contrast, goodness and mercy have been driven from people’s minds. This is more than a poetic variation. It is an inversion. The song begins with an absence. And that absence explains everything that follows: if the world is in crisis, it is because the moral qualities that make life together possible have disappeared from people’s consciousness.

Jah Sire deliver me. Jah Sire have mercy. Jah Sire Father send I some goodness and mercy.

This movement is essential and cannot be overlooked. After observing the disappearance of goodness and mercy, Benjamin does not move straight to a method, to what must be done. He prays. He asks Jah for precisely what is missing—goodness and mercy—so that he can lead his life rightly. What has disappeared can be recovered. Lead the life you lovetherefore does not mean absolute autonomy. Benjamin accepts responsibility for leading his life without claiming that the individual alone produces the standards that should guide it. He asks Jah for precisely what the world lacks—goodness and mercy. Responsibility and prayer are therefore not mutually exclusive: the individual must lead his life, while recognising that he alone does not establish the values that allow him to lead it rightly.

The reference to Jah thus allows us to understand responsibility without equating it with self-sufficiency: the individual must lead his life, but does not claim to produce, on his own, the values that should guide it.

It a go murder them, a go charge for a pure chemical industry. Them a run from cultivation.

This line is linguistically difficult, and we must remain cautious about precisely what Benjamin is addressing. What is clear is the opposition between chemical industry and cultivation—manufacturing on one side, cultivating on the other. One possible interpretation sees here two different relationships with living things: one that supports what grows at its own pace, another that seeks to produce according to a logic of yield. But the lyrics alone do not allow us to take the analysis much further without risking going beyond the text. We can only suggest that this opposition extends the earlier diagnosis: when goodness and mercy disappear, our relationship with living things may also become one of exploitation.

Lamentation is not the final state. It is the starting point.

Where Can We Find a Fixed Point to Guide Us?

Faced with this loss of direction, Benjamin offers neither a political programme nor a doctrine. He seeks reference points—things that remain when everything else has been overturned.

The mountains of Africa, they are familiar to me. You see the black sons of Cush, we were scattered everywhere.

Cush, the son of Ham and grandson of Noah, has become a symbolic figure of African peoples in Rastafari spirituality, often associated with Nubia, Ethiopia or the Horn of Africa. The word scattered is not neutral. It evokes the slave trade, slavery and the dispersal of African peoples across the world.

The mountains of Africa, they are familiar to me.

Why familiar? Not mine, not where I come from. Here, familiar can suggest something recognised, something inwardly close. Benjamin describes a memory that endures despite distance. Even dispersed, even far away, he recognises these mountains. They are not necessarily places he has lived in. They are places he has not forgotten. The word conveys an inner closeness—that of a son recognising what he belongs to.

And it is precisely because the sons of Cush have been scattered that the mountains become essential. The people may be dispersed. The mountains do not move. In a world where everything has been uprooted, displaced and renamed, they embody a permanence by which memory can continue to find its bearings.

But we are from the mountains of the moon. Kilimanjaro. Mount Rwenzori. Mount Nebo.

The Rwenzori were known in antiquity as the Mountains of the Moon and were regarded as the source of the Nile. Once again: origins. And origins cannot be displaced, even when a people can.

We must be precise here about what Benjamin universalises and what he does not say. He speaks from a particular memory—that of dispersed African peoples. He does not explicitly tell other peoples to rediscover their own roots. In this reading, however, what can be universalised is not necessarily Africa as everyone’s origin, but the role symbolic origins play here: providing a point of orientation for a dispersed people and allowing a continuity to be rebuilt between origins, identity and a way of life.

Your body is your temple. Your one and only temple. You are living in the holy places of the tabernacle of the Most High Jah.

The song’s progression is striking: it raises the question of personal happiness, recalls the state of the world, then affirms Africa and the mountains as symbolic origins, before finally arriving at the body. This is more than a change of scale. It is a gradual internalisation of reference points. Benjamin brings the place from which we can recover our bearings progressively closer—from the vastest to the most intimate.

The body is the destination of this entire progression. But we should not read it merely as the place for which we are responsible. Benjamin immediately continues: holy places, tabernacle, Most High Jah. The body is more than a space of personal autonomy. The body is the destination of this entire progression. But we should not read it merely as the place for which we are responsible. Benjamin immediately continues: holy places, tabernacle, Most High Jah. The progression thus moves from ancestral territory to the most immediate place that no displacement can take from us: the body. It becomes the point where spiritual direction takes concrete form. Even dispersed far from Africa, the individual still carries a “temple”—a space to care for and from which to act.

How Can We Keep Going Despite Suffering?

Recovering our bearings does not make pain disappear. This section answers a question the previous two left open: what should we do with the suffering that remains?

No tears. You don’t shed no tears. When I cry, I cry dry.

This passage might seem secondary. Yet it is the hinge of the entire song. Until now, Benjamin has been rebuilding reference points. With No tears, the song seems to show what those reference points can make possible: continuing to move forward despite suffering.

Knowledge of our origins removes neither suffering, nor dispersal, nor the world’s crisis. But it offers something suffering alone cannot provide: direction. And that is precisely what allows us to recover the ability to lead—to direct our lives.

I cry dry may evoke exhausted tears, suffering so deep that none remain, a form of endurance. Within the song’s overall structure, this refusal of tears can be read not as an absence of suffering, but as a refusal to let suffering entirely determine how one lives. It is not a prohibition on feeling emotions in the face of life’s difficulties. It is the decision not to let them have the final word.

The chorus then returns with renewed force. Love. Lead. Who is in charge now? Suffering? Or you? This is where inner rebuilding truly begins.

How Can We Give Our Actions the Right Direction?

Finding our own bearings is not enough. The final stage concerns how we act in the world—and the need to see clearly before acting.

Humanitarians, those of you saving only animals... What about humanity?

This passage could be read as a rather narrow criticism. Benjamin does not say: you care too much about certain causes. He asks a deeper question: what now directs our attention? Why do some forms of suffering become visible and prompt action, while others remain invisible?

The problem is not love. The problem is its direction. Compassion still exists. But it has lost its bearings.

Remove the scales from your eyes.

The image of scales probably recalls a passage in the Acts of the Apostles, where scales fall from Saul’s eyes and allow him to see differently—although this connection remains a plausible interpretation rather than a certainty. What matters in the song is the act itself: removing what prevents us from seeing. Action founded on distorted perception, however sincere or generous, remains fragmentary. It sometimes alleviates the consequences. But it no longer finds the centre from which rebuilding can begin. It is therefore not yet directed towards the life the chorus invites us to lead.

Conclusion: Leading Your Life

Love the life you live. Lead the life you love.

Benjamin does not answer the world’s disorder with a promise of happiness. He offers a way to recover our bearings. But this direction is not produced by the individual alone: it rests on Jah, on goodness and mercy, on the memory of origins, on the sacredness of the body and on attention rightly directed towards others.

Begin by seeing reality as it is—a world not guided by goodness and mercy. Rediscover through symbols what we cannot give ourselves alone. Recover fixed points—origins, mountains, the memory that endures despite dispersal: values. Root ourselves in a history. Return to our own bodies as the first sacred place and the first place of responsibility. Decide that suffering will not have the final word. Redirect our compassion towards what builds rather than what consoles. Only then does it become possible to lead our lives rather than simply endure them.

Love the Life You Live therefore does not claim that loving your life is enough. The song asks how to make a life truly worthy of love when we inhabit a world that has lost its bearings. Its answer lies in the verb lead. Leading your life does not mean exercising absolute control over the world, but recovering enough reference points—and receiving enough grace—to prevent the world’s crisis, dispersal and suffering from deciding entirely on our behalf how we will live.