I love Jill Christman’s essay, “The Sloth,” so much, I’m going to quote it here, as published in Brevity, in its entirety:

There is a nothingness of temperature, a point on the body’s mercury where our blood feels neither hot nor cold. I remember a morning swim on the black sand eastern coast of Costa Rica four months after my twenty-two-year-old fiancé was killed in a car accident. Walking into the water, disembodied by grief, I felt no barriers between my skin, the air, and the water.

Later, standing under a trickle of water in the wooden outdoor shower, I heard a rustle, almost soundless, and looking up, expecting something small, I saw my first three-toed sloth. Mottled and filthy, he hung by his meat-hook claws not five feet above my head in the cecropia tree. He peered down at me, his flattened head turned backwards on his neck. Here is a fact: a sloth cannot regulate the temperature of his blood. He must live near the equator.

I thought I knew slow, but this guy, this guy was slow. The sound I heard was his wiry-haired blond elbow, brushed green with living algae, stirring a leaf as he reached for the next branch. Pressing my wet palms onto the rough wooden walls, I watched the sloth move in the shadows of the canopy. Still reaching. And then still reaching.

What else is this slow? Those famous creatures of slow—the snail, the tortoise—they move faster. Much. This slow seemed impossible, not real, like a trick of my sad head. Dripping and naked in the jungle, I thought, That sloth is as slow as grief. We were numb to the speed of the world. We were one temperature.

I love this essay not only for the gorgeous writing and for what it expresses so gracefully and beautifully, but also for what it teaches us about how easy it is to use the figurative to think more fully about what we’ve come to the page to explore.

The figurative begins with a detail—in this case, the sloth—and then it expands to hold something more abstract within its concreteness. “What else is this slow?” Christman asks, and the answer, of course, is her grief. The figurative—image, simile, metaphor—becomes a way of connecting what’s hard to articulate to something that’s very tangible. It would be difficult for one to describe one’s grief over the loss of a loved one, but it’s easier to see it in something particular.

We should be on the lookout for details in our prose that want to serve our thinking. We might ask ourselves how a detail expresses what we can’t say directly. Given the right context, a sloth is something more than a sloth. It’s a doorway into another level of understanding. It takes the piece and the writer to a more fully realized place.