"It's like trying to describe what you feel when you're standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon or remembering your first love or the birth of your child. You have to be there to really know what it's like"

Some experiences resist translation into language because they exceed our usual frames of reference. Jack Schmitt points to three archetypes of the ineffable: the immensity of nature, the intensity of emotion, and the transformation of identity. Standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon compresses a continent’s geologic time into a single, dizzying vista. First love reorganizes attention and expectation, magnifying small moments into seismic shifts. The birth of a child redraws the boundaries of self and responsibility. You can list facts about each, measurements, biochemistry, medical details, but data cannot transmit the felt sense: the vertigo, trembling, expansion, and quiet that arrive when you are there.

There is a call to humility here. Hearing about something is not the same as undergoing it. This is not gatekeeping; it’s an invitation to seek encounter and to recognize the limits of secondhand knowledge. Metaphors and descriptions can aim your imagination, but they remain maps, not the terrain. Presence integrates sight, sound, smell, posture, heartbeat, and context into a single, unrepeatable event. That synthesis, what it does to your body and your story, constitutes the understanding.

The examples also span different dimensions of awe: vastness that shrinks the self, intimacy that sharpens the self, and responsibility that enlarges the self. Each is a threshold with a before-and-after, and thresholds are not simply observed; they are crossed. The meaning emerges from particulars too granular to generalize: the afternoon light on the canyon walls, the awkward laugh that becomes luminous, the silence right after the first cry. Language can point, but it cannot carry those textures intact.

The message encourages embodied curiosity and presence. Pursue the experiences that call to you. Listen to those who have gone, but leave room for the unsayable. Some realities are not problems for explanation to solve but invitations to show up, to let them happen to you, and to be changed.