What do you wish for tonight? Specifically, what do you wish you knew how to do tonight? Can you pick just one thing? I know I can’t. There’s an entire world of things out there to learn, understand, and do.

For one thing, there are the BIG things in life to do something about, like solving the COVID virus problem we have. Or solving the climate crisis. Or how to prevent the extinction of beloved species pushed from their habitats. Or solving cancer and any number of other ailments. Or ending poverty and war. All are things I wish I knew how to do. Those are too big for one person; they might be too big for all of us combined, even if we all managed to work together to try and solve them.

So, what about the things we can control? What about us individually? I wish I knew how to empathize fully with someone else’s life experience. There’s no way anyone can do that; we’ve got my own experiences which muck up our perspective of someone else’s life just has as their experiences would muck up trying to empathize with us. So that’s one thing I wish I knew how to do or do better.

I wish I were able to learn languages easily. Wouldn’t you love to travel the world and understand the culture around me the way someone fluent in the language understands it? Many people struggle to get through a foreign language in high school and college. It doesn’t prevent us from attempting Duolingo, but I know personally I’m not fooling anyone that I’ll ever be fluent in anything other than American English. What about you? Are you lucky at languages, or were you able to learn more than one as a child?

I wish I could memorize things quickly and recall them at the drop of a hat. I read a ton and have weird bits of knowledge, but some days my brain feels more like a sieve than an organized filing cabinet. Being able to pick up a book, read it, KNOW it, and be able to recall it days, months, or years later, would be awesome.

Finally, I wish I knew how to play an instrument other than handbells. To me, that doesn’t count so much as we color-code our notes. While playing handbells requires you to know your left from your right, how to count to eight (generally), and, if you color-code your notes, which one goes in your left or right hand, it’s not terribly complicated. Trying to play the trumpet, guitar, violin, piano, or [INSERT YOUR FAVORITE INSTRUMENT HERE] is much more challenging, especially if you have to read music to do so. Maybe one day I’ll learn to read music and be able to play the beautiful whale tail dulcimer I own.

So, what do you wish you knew how to do?