All His Tuneful Turnings

This life allows so few of its myriad pleasures to each of us.
A child in a grand, expansive amusement park with limited tickets
And only a few hours to use them knows exactly what I mean.
You can only read so many of the books you want to read.
And you know the more you read the longer the list grows,
And that in the end your list of unread books will be
Longer than it has ever been. You can only learn so many things.
You’ll never master the guitar. You’ll never be as fluent in French as you’d like,
Although there you may make progress. And your garden will never be finished.
Nor will your house. Most of the places on earth you want to see you never will.
And those you do manage to visit you will barely skim the surface of.
You’ll never really understand how refrigerators work. Or cars. Or calculus.
You’ll always be amazed that some people can read scores or equations and smirk,
Knowing you could learn to do that too, knowing that you never will.
You’ll never reach your potential in baseball. You'll never know how far you could have run.
And yet, if you are fortunate and persistent and can control your wanderlust a little
You can learn to do one thing well. There is time for that, though you may never
Master it. And you can love someone well and long enough to make her part of you.
Twice as many tickets, double the time.

Seeing As, part II

Part of "seeing" lies in the object. Most of seeing lies in the seer. If you don't learn to see differently, you will always be looking at the same thing, whether that thing is a cat or skyscraper or a star, whether it's a politician or a preacher or a war. Seeing differently is what metaphor allows us to do. All I have to do is call touch "the sight of my fingers" and I open a new world of seeing, a richer knowledge of the world. Learning a second language or a third does the same thing, since all languages are just new sacks of metaphors. Meeting other people accomplishes this as well, the otherer the better. A man among women, a straight among gays a white among non-whites. If you only know your mother tongue, talk to someone whose first tongue was not that. She'll draw from her native sack of metaphors. She cannot quite help it. The poorer her English, the richer you will be. Let the others in or you will atrophy. "Conservative" is a fancy word for fear.