Remember to Dream

While growing up, I was often one for dreaming-fancifully staring out the windows and staring off into space, wondering what the world beyond my own quaint little town was like. Oftentimes, these daydreams occurred whilst staring at the pages of a book or a magazine, and one in particular, a Life magazine about exploration and man’s quest to become one with nature, would surely jut me into the farthest reaches of space and sea, of jungle and mountain.

These images are flying forward today with the death of Sir Edmund Hillary. Truth be told, I knew little about Sir Edmund outside of his fateful journey one half-century ago. He was a politician but not a particularly successful one (John Glenn would surely beat him in that arena), and a Knight of the Garter (possibly Britain’s highest honor). But to know Hillary was to know his accomplishment, and few in the 20th Century could boast such a feat as to reach for the heavens on earth, or at least the “nearest thing to heaven” to quote Deborah Kerr.

One has to wonder, with the dwindling number of explorers in the world, where the next generation will come from, and where will they go? Where are the Edmund Hillary's, the Neil Armstrong's and John Glenn's, the Thor Heyerdahl's and Jacques Cousteau's? Where are those individuals who will reach into the depths of nature and not try to conquer it, but instead shoot to solve its mysteries? In this age of digital, well, everything, and the stress on the small, do the world’s citizens still want to reach for the stars? I pray that the imagination still thirsts for the grand and quixotic, and I’d like to think that this generation of men and women, those who discovered the world (and beyond) anew in the 1940s-1960s, are not the last to want to go into the depths of the natural unknown.

So tonight, before you head into the cozy enigmas of the unconscious, take a look at the world surrounding you, whether it be the stars in the heavens or the ground below you (or, in my case, the heaps of snow blocking the street), and take a long hard look at the beauty of nature, perhaps even allow yourself to imagine yourself, to wonder and think and pretend. After all, Everest, the Poles, the Moon: they too just began as dreams.