Wanderings

Today I was walking to work and I saw some people talking excitedly, looking up and pointing.  What are they looking at? I asked myself.  They seemed so enthralled that I couldn't resist turning around to see what had captured their attention.  And I saw Florence's cathedral and Brunelleschi's dome, surrounded by tourists and caricature artists and people taking photos....but nothing was out of place.  So I looked back at the people again, to see if maybe I had misjudged where they were looking.  But I looked at their eyes and saw that they were still just as excited and pointing just as clearly.  Seriously, what are they looking at?  Their eyes were fixed directly on the cupola, but the more that I looked, the more I could not understand what they were looking at.  Is there a bird up there?  Something that I'm missing?  My eyes were searching for something, anything.

Then it hit me.

Oh.

They were not looking at something on or near the dome, they were just looking at....the dome itself. Brunelleschi's dome, one of the great miracles in the history of architecture, arguably one of the greatest achievements of the human mind...ever.  It was the biggest dome in the world when it was built in the fifteenth century.  Even when Michelangelo built a bigger dome, the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, he noted that his creation could be "as big, but never as beautiful."

And so it has happened that this amazing piece of living, breathing history, that I imagine even Michelangelo paused to admire as he walked by, has become such a part of my daily routine that I could not even see it.  I had not even realized the extent to which I was rushing through that morning until that moment.  It reminded me of how important it is to stop, and take a deep breath, especially when I feel that I do not have time to do so and appreciate what I have right in front of me...

***

Walking in the most tourist-filled streets of Florence is something like walking through the entire world condensed into a few blocks.  More than anything, I listen for all the different languages.  Maybe I hear someone speaking German and someone speaking Swedish and someone speaking Japanese and someone speaking a language I could not even recognize if your life depended on it...all at the same time.

And I'm always tickled, to hear sounds that are so thoroughly foreign.  Above all, I love languages that are so different from anything that I know that I can not even separate individual words or sentences.  And sounds pass through my head and I can't even wrap my mind around the fact that those sounds, which to me sound totally random, actually mean something, actually mean a lot, when passing through someone else's mind.

And I remember what Italian sounded like before I could understand it.  Before I even understood the rhythm.  I remember sitting in my dorm room, doing speaking exercises during my first semester  of college and feeling the soft vibration that the words left on my tongue.  And how it lingered for a moment, even when I stopped speaking.  It was delightful.  How I wished, in those moments, that the feeling never had to go away!

I wonder, when I hear these other languages, what kind of feeling they leave on your tongue or on your lips.  And if I might someday roll Hungarian or Polish or Chinese around in my mouth, what those words would feel like, what they would taste like.

I think of how my life has been enriched by learning a new language.  How I have come to better understand a culture and a people, through the language and how, like one of those beautiful, antique keys, it has opened some special doors.

And suddenly, I want to know all the languages that the people around me are speaking, all at once!  Why couldn't I know every language in the world in a single instant?  But the very thought makes me dizzy.

Because I know that knowledge like this comes slowly and with effort.  Learning a language is like building a relationship, it takes time and patience and is, honestly, a bit messy.  Nothing meaningful can be achieved in a single moment.  It is the months of learning, the countless mistakes and the reaching beyond your comfort zone that make learning a language a meaningful experience, that make any experience meaningful, really.  And I wouldn't have it any other way.

So, I continue to walk on, quietly delighting in fragments of other people's conversations that I will never understand.