I read poetry very rarely. However, every time I read Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, “Conversation with a stone,” I feel touched. Why?
In the Polish Nobel Prize winner’s work, I see humans longing for something supernatural. For me, this poem speaks of people’s longing for something magical, something uncanny and other-worldly. However, the prose of everyday life of an average person, that is, everything that surrounds us, including a leaf, a drop of rain, or a stone we pass by during our day-to-day way to work, is something that absorbs and occupies practically humans whole lives. It is the reality that rules the world. Not the imagination, even such astonishing as Szymborska’s visions, but a real-life that is almost everything to us. Does that mean we should not daydream, write, create, and seek magic in reality? Contrary. In every work of art, the female Polish Nobel Prize winner encouraged others to seek something other-worldly in mundane surroundings. “Conversation with a stone” reminds me of one more thing.
It tells me that we should enjoy everything here and now, enjoy every little, tangible, thing or even item, without waiting for a miracle or a star from heaven.
Today is the day to start enjoying your life, no matter in which situation you are, my Dear Friend.
Carpe Diem.
For me, a famous Latin proverb says something like: seize the day because tomorrow you may not live. Are all these things I wrote to mean that we should stop believing in miracles or dreaming about a better tomorrow? Of course not. Still, we should remember that Utopia exists only on paper and our visions.
“Conversation with a stone” reminded me about another issue. It prompted the humans’ will to explore. From the very beginning, human civilization has the curiosity of everything that surrounds us. Thanks to the desire to discover new things, our culture grows. Undoubtedly, the craving to explore new areas and things is deeply rooted in us. This is evidenced by exploring unknown continents in the past or the desire to colonize Mars in the future. But, is there life on Mars? For today, we can only imagine that we can conversate with stones on Red Planet.
