To understand the weight of this song, you have to understand Lauryn Hill herself. She wasn’t just a singer; she was a seismic force. Coming off the success of The Fugees, Hill stepped into her solo work with the clarity of someone who had both something to prove and something to preserve. She poured her heart into Miseducation, a genre-bending mix of hip-hop, soul, and gospel that earned her five Grammys and a permanent place in music history (Light, 1999).

“Everything is Everything” pulses with that same genre-defying spirit. Lyrically, it carries both the weariness and wisdom of someone who’s been paying attention—to the world, to her own mind, and to the heartbreak and beauty in both. The chorus offers an element of lyrical mindfulness.

Everything is everything / What is meant to be will be

It echoes the therapeutic concept of radical acceptance: the notion that healing begins not by fixing everything, but by both acknowledging and then being brave enough to accept what simply is (Linehan, 2015). In mental health spaces, this kind of perspective is a cornerstone of recovery—particularly in practices like Dialectical Behavior Therapy (created by Linehan herself as she wrestled Borderline Personality Disorder...and won), where clients learn to hold both the pain of now and the hope of later with a brave honesty. The ability to accomplish this feat is planted in the reality of what the song brings next.

Quietly powerful, the following lines push in truth that the listener feels in the same muscles they can’t help stop from moving to the beat of the song itself.

After winter, must come spring / Change, it comes eventually

Lines like these draw from natural metaphors long cherished in recovery circles. When we’re caught in the grip of depression, trauma, or addiction, our brains struggle to imagine change... much less that change is possible (van der Kolk, 2014). This lyric challenges that stuckness wired into our memories and our neurological pathways.

It plants a seed.

Seasons turn. Cycles end. And when they do, healing becomes thinkable again.

I wrote these words / For everyone who struggles in their youth...

...It seems we lose the game before we even start to play

Ms. Lauryn Hill’s own story gives this lyric even more resonance.

In the years following Miseducation, she largely stepped away from the spotlight. Publicly, she faced criticism, scrutiny, and even legal battles. But privately, many recognized her withdrawal as a radical act of self-preservation. In a culture that demands constant output—especially from Black women—Hill’s silence spoke volumes. She was choosing health over hustle, healing over visibility.

That, too, is part of recovery.

And of course,

Everything is everything

What is meant to be will be

The beat of the song—produced with a young John Legend on piano—carries the lyrics like a heartbeat. This rhythm doesn’t just support the song; it supports the listener.

And of course, research has shown that rhythm can regulate our nervous systems, grounding us when our emotions feel unmanageable (Porges, 2011). In moments of anxiety, ennui, or even nagging low-level depression, the small act of nodding to a beat can help reorient us to our bodies, reminding us that we’re still here, still breathing. And when the words to that rhythm announce to us, ingraining in our memory like a liturgy, that “after winter must come spring,” we regulate our nervous system and accidentally repeat a mantra from Saint Hill that finds us a little stronger and a little more hopeful on the other side of it.

There’s something about Hill’s delivery—her raspy sincerity, her righteous anger, her holy and reflective memory of personal but collective experience, her softness—that holds space for us. She doesn’t tidy up the pain. She sings it. She doesn’t offer false hope. She offers real presence.

And a real existential promise that, truly, what is meant to be will be.

In the end, “Everything is Everything” is not just a phrase.

It’s a posture. It’s a way of walking through hardship without letting it harden you. It reminds us that healing doesn’t always look like joy—it sometimes, and probably more often than not, looks like honesty, rhythm, and letting the music hold what words can’t.

So if you’re in the middle of a hard season, maybe Saint Hill has something to pray for you.

Not advice. Not a solution.

Just the prayer of a song to carry you until the rhythm you’re living in shifts.