What If

Impractical thinking may bring us together.

Why not, sometimes, imagine “a what if” world?  “A Big Rock Candy Mountain!”  A world whose beating heart sings our songs.

That we have risen from this world, breath of its breath, there is no debate.  But we have also placed boundaries across its lands and altered its ocean currents.   

Our engineering has broken its ancient laws of distance and time.

It is now a made for…. world.  But for whom?  We seem in a battle to see how far we can make it for ourselves, selfishly.  Thousands of separate actions to surround our sand castles with moats, drawbridges up. 

But what if? 

Shouldn’t we raise a child to dream about alternative futures—to learn how to dream. 

Forsake the practical, the sustainable, the probable, the limitless notebooks of conditions.  A dream land.  Not an escape from reality, nor even an exercise in “free thought,” but an awakening of the mind.  A field of play where the blue birds sing. 

Moments taken from the weave of posts and tweets--purposeless moments, because it is always purpose that subtracts from our brief time of conscious life. 

I have no illusions about such idylls in the sun.  We all have serious work to do and it must be done within the framework of reality, as we see reality.  But allow me a moment to try to make a distinction.  The “what if” and the “what is” and the “what might be if my plans work out,” are all different and have separate worth. 

David Brooks, wrote in a recent column (NYT, July 1, 2021) that unifying narratives are necessary for a nation.  Each generation, he says, needs to learn more than facts, more than methods for evaluating evidence and solving problems—although these too are necessary.

“Great nations thrive by constantly refreshing two great reservoirs of knowledge. The first contains the knowledge from the stories we tell about ourselves.

This is the knowledge of who we are as a people, how we got here, what long conflicts bind us together, what we find admirable and dishonorable, what kind of world we hope to build together.

This kind of knowledge isn’t merely factual knowledge. It is a moral framework from which to see the world. 

… This emotional and moral knowledge should give us a sense of identity, a sense of ideals to live up to and an appreciation of the values that matter most to us — equality or prosperity or freedom. Finally, these are shared stories; this shared knowledge should help us discover a shared destiny and our shared affection for one another.”

“What ifs” I believe are such stories, they transcend the divisive narratives we tell of our present conflicts, honoring one side and one selection of values.  They are fantasies but not fantastic.  They are wishful dreams that awaken within each of us visions to be shared.  They tell us about “the good,” the truly good, beyond our ledgers and our government reports.  They are not Republican stories or Democrat stories.  They are as close, perhaps, as we can get to the human story, and, through that doorway, all of us can seek, the joy of human life on this fragile vessel of Earth, the only home we shall ever know.