Imagination

I remember one day when I was a kid.  I was in elementary school.  My twin brother came home from school and said he had something he wanted to show me.   He pulled one of the white tea saucers from the cabinet in the kitchen.  He filled it with water and carried it outside.  I followed.

Straight out the back door he walked down the path to the back fence.  There on a brick he placed the small plate.  Then he told me his secret.  If we left the water there for about two hours is would disappear.  He called it evaporation.  I called it stupid.  We left the water.

We came back later and the water was gone.  I was baffled.  He called it evaporation.  I called it trickery; the water couldn’t have actually disappeared.  I went and asked my mom if he had tampered with the plate when I wasn’t paying attention.  She told me that he hadn’t, she said it was evaporation.  I said it was magic.  Water vanishing into thin air had to be magic.

Science he called it.  I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.  I asked his how it worked.  He said the water turned into gas and floated away.  It was too much for my little mind.

My childish mind could not open wide enough to fit certain ideas that now seem so simple.   Naturally I wonder if I am still the same way.  Are there ideas and truths that I am blind to for no reason other than my intellectual immaturity?  Perhaps.  I wonder what I am missing out on by not being able to imagine bigger and better. 

I think of the portrayal of future technology in the media in the not so distant past.  Even when the mind was imagining space travel and making technology that would fit in a futuristic age they were limited.  Even their wildest imaginings could not fathom the amazing territories into which technology would expand.  If our computers, cell phones and music players were shown to those dreamers of the past, they would be utterly astounded.  They would be the equivalent of a second grader hearing of evaporation for the first time.  Magic they would call it.  And to us it is the common place, the mundane.

I am excited for my mind to be continually stretched and enlarged by the advance of technology.  Great things lie ahead.  I hope that I can keep up.