Wild Ideas

When I was ten I lived on a boat in San Pedro, California. That was 1972. There was a guy living on an old, beat up, dirty trimaran in the dumpiest part of the marina across from ours. My stepfather and some of the hard headed folks he ran with and who lived in the same coffin-like mental "box" he did used to make fun of that guy. Living the way he did was equivalent to living in a run down van parked in a WallMart lot in present day. "He's a dreamer," they would verbally poke each other, "he's got some wild ideas about aviation that will never happen," they would laugh. "Thinks he's going to use computers to design parts," my stepfather, lets call him W.B., would say. He said that about a guy a few boats down from us, too, who had two kids and lived on a sailboat. Richard wanted to design sailboats using computers. "Never going to happen," W.B. would repeat while shaking the days dust from his beard over a cold plate of food. I knew both of those guys well, as well as a kid aged ten could - knew them as friends - listened to them like an adult - and saw what they saw in their heads. When they looked around at the end of a long day they didn't see their circumstances, they saw their dreams, the ones in their minds, but more than that, they saw their dreams as reality, and not too many years later they made those dreams a reality that we all take for granted as just that. Our world is mental, and everything we see that is not natural, from anywhere we stand, was first in someones mind, and the reality they created is recalibrated in ours. Every future possibility, every breakthrough, every advance in humanity, is in our minds and in everyone else's minds right now. And every limit we place on ourselves, every box we step into, every wall we kick against, is in our minds, and everyone else's minds, too. It just comes down to what we choose to see.