what a world, what a world

"What a world, what a world," Grandmother used to sigh when she sat in her chair in the living room, looking out the French doors.

I always laughed. "Grandma, you can only see about ten feet either way on the street! It's not exactly the whole world." Once in a while a truck from the stoplight on Jefferson Street would lumber by grinding through its gears, or someone would pass by on the sidewalk, heading downtown. That was the big action. Otherwise it was a still tableau: the street lights, the maple tree, the building across the street, and the filtered play of light and shadows coming through the sheer curtains. The "world" was only perhaps ten or fifteen yards across and a few yards high.

But it was a world, you see; it was her whole world, her window on reality. Oh sure, we had radio and television, a phone and the newspaper. But those are electronics and technology, second-hand information.

The fact is, as human beings we can't get a very big picture of reality directly in our lifetimes, and we probably couldn't handle it if we could. Our minds have only our senses to tell us what's out there. The rest we have to infer, learn from secondhand sources, remember or imagine. And no matter how much we stuff into our puny brains, it's a small slice of the What Is pie.

So we cast our lines into the vastness and turbulence, experiencing, wondering, imagining, remembering, trying to get a feel for the edges of it and the depth of it somehow, and make some sense of it and try to understand it. But we can't. We're not biologically equipped to be omniscient or omnipresent, despite having ever-more-wondrous tech toys to extend our view and range.

There's a reason for these human limits, I suspect. To bear the burden of all experience would kill us. For one mind to know everything would be impossible. To feel the weight of all suffering would crush us. To feel the rapture of all happiness would fry our circuits. Writers--especially poets--welcome the ride, eager to intensify the soul's boundaries to the breaking point. But for most of us, we learn to sense our limits and respect them. We stake out boundaries and make choices.

We put together a reality we can handle, a life that feels right to us, a view of the world that resonates for us as reasonable given our capacities and preferences. It's not Reality, it's just our reality. Our world becomes the one we know best, and what a world it can be!