The limits of our language

If you have never seen a ship, you might call it a city on the water.

If you have never seen a city, you might say "a wandering island."

If you know forests, you might see its masts as trees out at sea.

Language gives us a way to think about the world.

But we can mistake what we think.

We may feel a hundred kinds of sadness and just call them sad: The hurt of being left, the quiet after a goodbye, the grief of outgrowing what you swore was forever.

One simple word to hold all of our complexity together.

You might think of silence as the absence of sound until you begin to distinguish the silence of people who trust each other.

What seemed similar becomes different.

You might say I miss you when you mean that you miss who you were together.

The feeling arrives in an instant, but the sentence can take years to come to life.

Sometimes learning a word is like finding a door in a wall you had mistaken for the edge of the world.