! ! This Your Gift

She said that each one in the world has a special talent: what we’re better at, than anybody else… so, it’s a glorious gift, - a glorious duty - to know, acknowledge, this; but what happens, so she said, is that we know this, and deny it; but then if pressed somehow, we make a condition for ourself: ‘well, only if…’ and this – the devil in the detail – is a way to lock our talent in; to keep the world without… I said to her, an instance? and she said, this man, he had a gift: to be always in the rightest place, and at the rightest time; but when this was revealed to him, he said, OK but only if I can give up my job.. but it was his job, she said, enabled him to manifest that talent… you may not forget this poem; this was a lady I shall not forget.