I guess what I’m saying here is that there’s the bland, big picture profundity – the motivational posters that feature orcas, 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 of profundity, the kind you can’t easily share or describe but to a few people, if ever.

For example.

A man – a hypothetical man – walks to work at a pretzel factory every day, out on the dusty edge of the town he was raised in. A small town. Three stoplights, a dot in the great rimless midwest. He walks past the wind-worn cyclone fencing that circles the bankrupted construction site, walks past the high school where he swept long coordiors for a few lonely years after graduating, walks past the tree where he got in to his first fight. Past the swimming pool where he first felt fear. You get the picture. The walk is full. He has become his commute.

Now it's midday. Our man is just back from lunch break, walking down the side of a huge sweltering room—an industrial cave with high walls and a curved ceiling, a room full with a twisted gleaming city of pretzel equipment—and he might not even see the machines any more, not after all these years of walking this same path. And so he’s on his way back to his chair and he stops to talk with a coworker, any coworker. Maybe this coworker runs the salt machine, or the dough machine or the machine that bends pretzels in to that pretzel shape. Anyway, he chats with this coworker and they veer in to a conversation about the machinery itself for a moment, they have one of those discussions 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 professional pidgin that has been years in the making for both of them. Language that binds them together while setting them apart. And that conversation in this shared language gets our man thinking, puts his mind on a track it’s never been on before. That one conversation in their special shared language cracks his innermost self open like a nut that's just been lying there, dormant and rocklike, waiting. Maybe the seed of this thought blooms, takes root inside, expands in to a whole new system of self, breaking through some inner wall, and the constructed self that saw the world so confidently begins to crumble. These things happen.

The point here is that if that conversation had been overheard, or written down, or uttered elsewhere, would be meaningless. It would just be words. And that's the thing. That's the perfect, beating heart of it that will never make it on to Facebook or the orca poster or the tear-jerker of a Disney flick. The profoundity lives in the context. It is nestled inside that lunch, those machines, the special pidgin he shares with the coworker and even the humdrum walk to work. It is the layers of skin and shell around this mysterious seed of potential, it is the glorious, unknowable specificity of circumstance that causes the mundane to finally swell, crack and begin the world again.