Prodigy

Artists, composers, architects, inventors and all manner of designers face a challenge that is particularly difficult for the majority of the population: creation. Clearly there are many levels of skill when it comes to new creations. We know of Mozart, DaVinci and Edison. Men who possessed significant capacity to create new things that we can look at and say to ourselves, That's quite a thing. Others are a bit less skilled in their ability to create, producing compositions that are less than beautiful, or inventions that simply don't work. The key to separating the wheat from the chaff lies in the imagination.

Imagination is the key to creation. When someone is creating something new, they are bringing into existence something that didn't exist before. That's true whether a child is building a sand castle or a nuclear physicist is building a new detector for exotic atomic particles. The guiding force during the process of creation is the imagination of the creator, of the designer.

When we imagine, we are creating. In our mind's eye, something new has come into existence. If we are sufficiently talented, we can translate that mental concept into a physical reality. The more completely we can imagine the final result, the more perfect that result will be. I'm quite sure that Mozart could imagine his symphonies in a single thought, with every note and every instrument tied together into a coherent whole. It was not a series of notes to him, but rather a single creation. The fact that it had so many bits and pieces was purely coincidental.

Imagination is required to create, but what is required to critique? Little more than the ability to perceive. If I can see a painting, I can decide whether or not I like it. That's it. There is a certain creative artistry to communicating that perception to others, of course. That is what anyone who authors a written or oral piece must have. The greater the skill, the more coherent the presentation. Yet a critic is not a creator by nature.

I am reminded of a favorite quote of mine of Theodore Roosevelt.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

Creation is a dramatic thing, as Theodore Roosevelt understood. It is the task of making something that was never there before. That includes changes such as democracy. The founding fathers had a mental image of how a nation could be ruled to produce the greatest good. This is why we call such men visionaries. They see something in the future that could be. They sometimes "dare greatly" to bring about that future.

The greatest creators are the ones who form a single thought, a single notion, that comprises the whole of their creation, then bring that creation into being in one act and finally let it stand on its own merits. No finishing touches, no tune ups, no tweaks. It was complete when it was set down the very first time. It's an exremely rare thing, but it does happen. People who can accomplish such things are usually assigned the moniker "prodigy".

Now consider the universe itself. Modern theory of creation declares that the universe originated in one colossally energetic event, the big bang. Once that event took place, a multi-billion year sequence of events was begun, leading to the present day and continuing into the future for an unknown period of time. Billions of years and countless stars spread across distances so vast that we cannot get our heads around them.

If you believe in God and you wish to appreciate how vast God's ability is, look at your hands. See the intricacies of your fingerprints and the dexterous control that you have of so many things about you. Then look up. At night, we are regaled with the stars. If you have a good imagination, picture the stars as they really are; they are suns as large or larger than our own, at indescribable distances. Around those suns are other planets. Some as large as Jupiter, others as small as the Earth. And on those planets, there may well be other beings who are contemplating their own hands and looking up into the night sky. Trillions of suns with how many planets with how many people, being born, living lives, growing old and dying. Cementing their own dreams into action, changing their own future bit by bit, day after day, year after year, since the beginning of time itself.

Science tells us that God created all that in a moment. I wonder what He was thinking.

Why We Do What We Do

People occupy their time with a vast array of activities. For most people, work consumes the majority of their day. Salesmen, doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, housewives, plumbers, teachers, construction workers, accountants; the list is endless. Speak to someone who is a zealot about their profession and they'll regale you with stories of business trips, accomplishments, hilarious incidents, and the sheer satisfaction of the task that they perform.

Yet if you were to ask any of them if they would be happy if they had their job and were alone on planet Earth, you'd get a resounding "no". That's going to be true if you ask someone who is an enthusiast about their job, their hobby or any other activity into which they expend the majority of their time. It's going to be true because we are fundamentally enthusiasts about the people around us. Our profession or our hobby gives us a means - or an opportunity - to interact with those people.

The most vibrant people that you will ever meet have accomplished the seemingly simple feat of figuring out how to have a role in society that permits them to interact with the most people. They have no desire to step away from society. Rather, they step into society with gusto, savoring their interactions with the people that they know and always seeking interactions with those that they don't. There are no strangers for such people.

Note that the vibrant people have a role and they connect with the society. Some connect with society and some have a role, but only the connection of the two produces the most vibrant people. At the opposite end of the spectrum are people who have neither a role in society nor any connection with people. Hermits. They merely exist. More damaging than hermits are those who take up a role, but who have no desire for a connection with society. Their actions are not grounded in a desire for the well-being of the community that surrounds them, but rather in some other ethic. They pursue some ethic that is borne of themselves. It is a selfish ethic.

Consider men like Hitler and other brutally-minded men that are infamous in world history. These men have a limited sense of community. Hitler believed in the Arian community, but no other. Other influential men and women have had similarly warped and vacant notions of community, and invariably it has led to pain and suffering for those excluded from those notions.

Believe it or not, this is a segue to Christmas. Today is the eve of Christmas, when Christians celebrate the birth of Christ. Christ may be viewed as perhaps the first human being who declared that his sense of community encompassed everyone in the world. There were no exceptions. We might reject his willingness to include us, but he included us anyway. Today, we call that ethic "Being Christian".

Modern civilization simply would not exist if it were not for the altruistic sense that leads to the idea that everyone in the world is our neighbor. We started out such that the only people that we were willing to declare our friends were family members. Then it expanded to our clan. From there, we broadened our horizons to include village, city-state, and nation. Each such structure exists only because of the shared identity of its citizens. Without altruism to remind us that those we don't know can still be our friends and allies, we would revert to tribalism. If you doubt that, look around the world. Where you see tribalism, look for the absense of altrusim. And vice-versa.

Christ was the wake-up call for the world. Christ spoke about essentially one thing: altruism. He was the one who popularized the idea of helping everyone else. Treating our neighbor as we would want to be treated ourselves. That simple formula makes everything possible.

Whether you are a Christian or not, take a few moments tomorrow to remind yourself what Christmas really meant to the world. The birth of Christ was the birth of altruism. It gave us civilization. It gave us the society in which we prosper and for which we work so diligently. The only limitations in our society are the ones that come from our unwillingness to practice altrusm - to see our fellow man as our friend and neighbor. We all have our limits, after all. Ultimately, involvement with community is why we do what we do, and when all is said and done, that's just being Christian.

Merry Christmas.

Potential for Happiness

At conception we are a single cell. Nothing more. Yet that one cell has the potential to become anyone in the world, good, bad or indifferent. It's an extraordinary thing when you think about it. The process of life begins with that one cell and proceeds until the end of life, sometimes as much as 100 years later.

A bottle of wine can be manufactured in a single growing season, but certain wines take years to mature, to reach their full potential in flavor, aroma and color. A cheese similarly matures in a certain amount of time. Let's hope that nobody tries to mature cheeses for years on end.

Maturing a human being also takes time, but it's not something that we can accomplish by just sitting around like a bottle of wine or a wheel of cheese. We will certainly mature to a certain extent by simply going about our business, day after day, but that will only get us so far.

Consider yourself at conception. You were that single cell, full of potential. Potential to do what? That is the question that faces us when we consider the process of maturation. When we mature, we realize our potential, we become as complete as we can be. Grapes realize their potential in wine when they have been fermented, casked, bottled and processed with just the right ingredients and for the right times. The single cell of a human embryo realizes its potential in becoming the finest human being that they possibly can.

As you can tell from my articles, I'm very much the idealist. I'd like the entire world, or at least America, to become filled with what I call Philosopher Kings. People of such vast wisdom and power that they can only be referred to with that rather high-minded title. In America, however, there has been a sense of people being just fine the way they are. While I can accept that notion to the degree that everyone needs a sense of self-esteem, I reject it when it tells people to turn their backs on realizing their potential; to mature.

I believe that all our lives, we should be examining our philosophy of life and our manner of applying it in an effort to become the greatest people that the world has ever known. We have the opportunity to do that as no civilization ever has before us. I'm not suggesting this out of some ivory tower sense of idealism. My idealistic pursuit is firmly rooted in the idea that to pursue a world of philosopher kings is to pursue nirvana, or heaven, or paradise - whatever you want to call it.

This is the source of inspiration for Opinion Dump: to encourage others to see the world as I do, ever mindful of the goal of creating as heavenly a situation on Earth as we can. America is the best that the world has ever seen, and it serves as an example to the world of what is possible. But we're not perfect, and we know that. The imperfections are what we can be working on.

As you work your way through life on your path from embryo to centenarian, think of the process of maturation. How can you become a better man or woman, to realize your full potential here on planet Earth. It is my fervent hope that you can mature more completely than a humble bottle of wine.