I guess what I’m saying here is that there’s the big-picture kind of profundity - the motivational posters that feature whales, the facebook feeds littered with Rumi quotes, the Disney epics that end with everyone filing out of the theater glassy-eyed and sniffling - and then there’s the more specific kind, the kind you can’t easily share or describe but to a few people, if ever. Does that make sense? Let me give you a hypothetical.

A man walks to work at a pretzel factory every day, out on the dusty edge of town. Has done for decades.

Our man might be just back from lunch break, might be walking down the side of a huge room - a factory room with high walls and a curved ceiling; a room full with a gleaming city of pretzel equipment - and he might not even see the machines any more, not after all these years of working in the same factory. He might just be walking on by, his stomach nearly full. And so he’s walking back to his chair and he might stop to talk with a coworker, and maybe this coworker runs the salt machine, or the dough machine or the machine that bends pretzels in to that pretzel shape, and he chats with this coworker and maybe they veer in to a conversation about the machinery itself for a moment; maybe they have a discussion that only they can have; one that would sound like a different language if you or I were to listen in; a conversation in a sort of shared pidgin that has been years in the making for both of them. And maybe that conversation gets our man thinking, puts his mind on a track it’s never been on before. Shoot, maybe that one conversation in their special shared language cracks his innermost self open like a nut that he’ll live off of for the rest of a happy life.

And that’s the thing - that’s the one thing. That lunch, those machines, their conversation and that particular pretzel pidgin are nothing but layers of shell around that one goddamn nut that you and I will never eat.