Imagine

Imagination. It is the one superpower we - humans - possess that no other living thing can ever have. It is the one true gift that cannot be taken away from one by another. It is also where every river-idea begins to flow from; where even the impossible becomes possible. Think about it for just a minute.  Long before man's first journey to the moon or ventured into the depths, Jules Verne already imagined it.  Einstein did not need a laboratory for his experiments, yet his theories proven decades after his death were all conceived and tested through his thought experiments all within the confines of his imagination.  And the thing about imagination  is that each of us has access to it even if we are simply sitting on a chair sipping coffee or merely looking at what's out there through our window.

"Life is Beautiful" was a 1997 film that won multiple awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Actor for the Italian movie maker/actor Roberto Benigni; the movie plot is summarized below:

"When an open-minded Jewish waiter and his son become victims of the Holocaust, he uses a perfect mixture of will, humor and imagination to protect his son from the dangers around their camp."

Imagination is the magic carpet  which any person may use to travel to places no one had ever gone to before. It is also the only vehicle upon which only an individual possesses that no one may take away. It is only with permission that you or I may let another share what it is that fascinates us. Until then, it is all our own. 

So, imagine this.

Imagine a single grain of sand. One from a beach on an island, or a sand dune on a desert.  Imagine that grain of sand to be our sun, where a million earths will fit in. Imagine that grain of sand as just one of two hundred billion in the one galaxy that is also just one of billions, if not trillions, of galaxies in the universe of unimaginable size. To imagine that there are more suns in the universe than there are grains of sand in all the beaches and deserts on the entire earth is supposed to be an underestimation.

Imagine that the one grain of sand that is our sun - where a blue dot, one of eight or nine, circling around it - takes them all along a seemingly never ending journey that takes 225 million years to complete one revolution around the Milky Way galaxy at 143 miles per second.

Imagine that in that one blue dot is someone like you, endowed with the ability to contemplate your place, your fate and the dreams you've had, to be somewhere or anywhere. That alone will make you wonder what latent power resides in a three pound mass sitting atop your shoulder that no one else is privy to, unless you want them to. 

In fact, right at this very moment, you may pause your reading.  Imagine now whatever pleases you or what it is you will want to do. Or, imagine that what got you here was a series of serendipitous moments, good fortune, self sacrifices and countless help from so many that now allows you to enjoy this one moment that millions upon millions of people around this blue dot are not able to do because there is no Wi-Fi connection, no electricity, or not even a roof to shield them from the elements, or no government to provide the services you enjoy, or if there is such a government, it is one that does not allow you access  to what you are reading now. There is much your imagination will take you to but do not forget that as much you think you can, there is literally a limitless swath that you have not yet explored or contemplated.

But there are certain things that seem to defy imagination.  For example, while still imagining that tiny blue dot, circling a grain of sand, why is it that for thousands of years of history, people living on it had gone through so much division and disagreements as to wage war on one another to create so much death, anguish and suffering that to this day is a constant reminder of human folly.  Yes, indeed as much as we would like to think of our limitless ability to imagine, this one defies it altogether.

Well, John Lennon (one of the Beatles, in case you forgot) did try with his famous composition, "Imagine". The chorus in the song went:

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one

Is it impossible to hope? Well, we have to imagine.  We need to. We seem to forget that the single grain of sand that shepherds our little blue dot is so far away from its nearest neighbor that if we switch the analogy the task of finding or reaching another one like it is impossibly daunting. 

Imagine again. Make that grain of sand the size of a golf ball sitting on top of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.  The next golf ball closest to it is sitting somewhere past Montreal in Canada. If we manage to somehow destroy this blue dot, which we have the capacity to do several times over,  we can indeed imagine the impossible - that of reaching that other golf ball, hoping that there is another one blue dot there.

We might as well imagine that this blue dot is all we have. Imagine too, that you who is reading this is a product of a very long chain of serendipitous events to make you you because had there been one single break in the chain you will not be here. 

Imagine.