The Perfect Metaphor I recently remembered a story my mom likes to tell from when I was little. We were with family at a hotel pool, and I was the youngest of the group of cousins there. The others, including my older sister, were big enough and good enough swimmers to go in the deep end, and they spent most of their time there. I was…an okay swimmer. My parents had insisted I take swim lessons. “Because so much of the earth is covered with water,” I remember my mom explaining, “you don’t want it to be a true emergency for you to just fall in.” But my desire to…