In life, there are billions of experiences you could have. Billions of alternate lives you could live, thousands of emotions you could feel, and unimaginable paths your life could take.

Along the way, you get to experience a lot. You get to understand your life and your range of emotions really well. But what about all those other paths you could have taken and those experiences you could have had? You'll never know what those are like because you never lived it yourself.

I'll never know what it's like to experience life on a reservation, because I'm not Native American. I don't know what it's like to live without a limb or what it's like to raise a kid. I don't know those feelings, because I've never lived through them.

And I've always said that you will never truly know what an experience or emotion is like until you live through it yourself. But, there is certainly merit to the idea of vicarious living. Because the fact of the matter is that we realistically can't experience every emotion or every event. We just can't. Life is too damn short.

But for those of us who are hungry for experiences and adventures, the good news is that humans have an incredible way of vicariously understanding the things we may never get to experience: through the power of the metaphor.

Not too long ago, I was part of my high school's debate team. I remember those Friday afternoons really well. I loved getting into deep topics and talking about life. Unfortunately, back then, I was way too inexperienced and far, far too focused on the wrong things. I never really had much to say, and I didn't know how to talk about things and learn from discussions like I do know.

But even so, there was one particular debate that settled into my mind and stuck there. It was a debate about whether or not schools should continue to teach poetry. My English teacher, Mr. Kreinbring, participated in the discussion, and the way that he so passionately argued for poetry and its utter importance to a child's education stuck with me, even though I didn't really understand what he was saying then.

I get it now.

Poetry is our way of understanding what we have never experienced. Because poetry is the art of the metaphor. Metaphors help you understand the parts of the world that you have never experienced or that you are just beginning to try to comprehend. It helps you wrap your head around abstract concepts using the imagery and emotions of concrete concepts you already recognize. Poetic metaphors allow you to experience something new with the emotional understanding of past memories.

That's why poetry is so important. It lets you to experience those other-worldly things through metaphors. And each poem, each metaphor is so unique. They carry connotations, negative and positive. They carry themes and moods and they set tones to help you understand how you should feel about something.

That is why poetry means more the older you get, the more stories and experiences you collect. You have a bigger pool to draw from, to make connections with, and to understand the new things in life. This ability is a gift; we should use it to understand experiences different from ours. We should use it to learn to care about things we might not understand first-hand. We should use it. I don't know if schools are thinking about removing poetry from curriculum, but if they are, please don't. Poetry should never be allowed to die. Especially not now, when empathy is a trait found few and far between but needed more than ever.

I'll leave you with this metaphor I wrote sometime ago when it felt like life was unraveling:

Imagine your life as a woven sweater. Each thread represents a piece of your life, the important things you care about and the unimportant things that fill up the rest of the spaces, all intricately woven together. When you look at the whole sweater, it shouldn't matter whether one little thread is out of place. Because one little thread could unravel the whole sweater, if you tug and worry at it. It doesn't need to do that; that thread doesn't need to unravel your whole sweater. You can cut it away, tuck it back in, or just leave it be. The sweater is still all there. It still keeps you warm. It still looks pretty dope.

Keep your sweaters intact. Don't let one unruly thread unravel the years you spent knitting it together.