Dare to Dream

Imagination can be full of wonder. A princess and a castle among the clouds is easily envisioned. As I headed toward a well-kept path in the park at daybreak I tried to imagine how the first humans greeted the day. Would I uncurl from the tree branch and stretch lazily? Or would I step to a cave opening and breathe deeply of the crisp 58 F morning air? According to studies by psychologists, anthropologists and biologists, the human mind builds scenarios upon guidelines it has come by through experience and intuition.
I can draw upon experience in the dear dead days beyond recall as the old song goes when I lived without electricity. There were lamps to light the kitchen after sundown to eat or read by and lanterns to find my way around in the barn to avoid spilling the milk I stole daily from patient cows. Outdoors there was moonlight and stars which could be amazingly bright and not a spark of artificial light cluttered the landscape.
But none of that prepares me to envision constant outdoor living to forage for food and insure safety. However, I find it difficult to believe that the first humans lived in the constant fear that limits today’s society. Early peoples would be alert to predators when moving beyond their beds and be cautious in venturing into unknown territory. Maybe the first explorer didn’t get over the first ridge in his or her yondering but long before Marco Polo and Daniel Boone explorers did succeed in populating the entire globe within the most recent thousands of years.
History records many discoveries, the latest being Kennewick man, a skeleton found in 1997, along the Columbia River in Washington State, carbon dated at 9,000 years before present. The fifty some year old man has a clovis projectile point embedded in his right hip bone - a point knapped in a style abandoned 500 years past. Living in the outdoors was still a challenge in North America.
By that time, Chinese and European peoples had long since denuded their lands of trees, created deserts, and crowded into limited spaces that invited plagues and epidemics periodically. Those are times I care not to imagine in any detail. Are we safe from reliving those scenarios?
There is the need to imagine a reasonable future. One of peace and creativity surely must be in the minds of Homo sapiens, minds which have made more discoveries in the past century than in a hundred generations before that. Imagination (and patient hard work) brought scientific advances into the twenty first century. We must keep our imaginations active and creative.
And for future survival, a vital ingredient must be compassion.
Naomi Sherer