Nothing is a clear shot. Or at least if there is such a thing it is a rare. And maybe it is an awful metaphor no matter what.

Metaphors are interesting things. How often we use them when the vehicle of the metaphor is something we’ve never actually experienced ourselves. Making it, what? An embedded metaphor in a way? An effective way to remove the idea further from the body rather than bringing it back to lived experience?

I woke up cold this morning and pulled on long wool underwear and rain pants to walk Leonard around the block. At 4:30 it is still completely dark now. I am surprised to pass three men in work clothes, plodding along through the suburb carrying plastic grocery bags. Heads down. Not in a group. Three individual encounters. Leonard stays quiet and calm, so I consciously breathe.

Home again. And in the library with a cup of coffee. I find my butt slipping off the desk chair. “Butt in the chair”. It’s not a metaphor is it? “Difficult to keep your butt in the chair”. Just write.

But the truth is, if you are still wearing you rain pants your butt will not stay in the chair.

E. is laughing at me. With me. Leonard stretched over the little rug with his eyes closed.

This is my life. A random, mundane moment. Sometimes I would think I would trade all the highs for more of these relaxed moments – before the news-site headlines creep into my thoughts, before anyone needs more from me than I can provide with a slow stroll through a damp morning and the opening of a treat-cupboard door.

E. brings me coffee. I slip off the plastic pants and am suddenly mindful of the texture of the wool underwear. It is such a silly thing – this illusion of comfort and the connection to something so simple/difficult, to a past culture that I have never experienced and can only imagine where every morning is as cold and damp as this one, but warm with breath of dogs and sheep and maybe a goat. It’d be fun to think this was some sort of genetic memory. But I am sure I have seen too many films, read too many books, wished for a life other than the one I landed in.

What would it be like to wake and move a body through a series of motions – lift, twist, tug, heave – without dwelling on horrors halfway around the world over which you have no influence. What would it be like to have to focus on the immediate, present, physical world. The daily tasks repetitive motions, rituals of will: order, comfort, sustenance. It’s it a form of prayer? A metaphor for what we wish for the world? A vicarious effort to make things better for everyone, by staying alive – contributing? By tending what we can touch?

Scott Peck wrote a book long ago and tried to define love strictly as a verb. It changed the way I thought about my life. About the people who “loved” me, and my responsibility in loving. I am thinking about compassion. As a verb. Maybe the term compassion fatigue is all wrong. Compassion isn’t what is wearing us down.

What is wearing us down is helplessness.

The world is too big. Our reach?… is not a metaphor.