What’s It Like Outside?

When Words Carry Different Worlds

Sometimes the vast difference in how we move through the world reveals itself in the smallest, most ordinary exchanges.

A colleague once asked me a question that felt, in the moment, wonderfully human:
“What’s it like outside?”

I answered instinctively, with a kind of eagerness:
“It’s a bright day — cool air, blue skies, sunlight you can almost drink in. The kind of day that makes you want to wander slowly, to stretch your lungs in nature.”

But that wasn’t what they meant at all.
They weren’t reaching for weather, or wonder.
They were asking about work materials that needed to be processed — a purely functional question, cloaked in words that sounded like an invitation into beauty.

And in that instant, two entire ways of being brushed past one another.

For one of us, outside meant sky and breath and poetry.
For the other, outside meant pallets and tasks and the weight of what still needed managing.

Neither perspective was wrong. Both were real.
But the moment carried a quiet revelation: how easily we can miss each other, even when the words themselves are so simple.

Some people see sunlight.
Others see what the sunlight falls upon that demands their attention.

Both lenses have their purpose.
But every now and then, it might be worth pausing —
to notice which one you’re using,
and what you might be missing if you never lift your eyes to the sky.

💭 And what about you?
When someone asks, “What’s it like outside?”
do you lean first toward the poetry of the day,
or toward the practical weight of what’s waiting?

Maybe both are true. Maybe both have something to teach.