Don’t Underestimate The Human Mind

Especially, don’t underestimate your mind when imagining a new and different future.

The realities for which human imagination is responsible are both awesome and awful. Look around a cityscape; and think - I mean REALLY think - about how all which you see was once grasses and trees, and not much else.

The human mind which transformed everything around you is in you as well. All the STUFF you see is just STUFF that once was merely an idea, an impossibility in human minds. Your health and wellness journey is no different. A wasteland could be restored to a wetland habitat. A grassy knoll could become a bustling metropolis. No one must accept that “this is just the way it is.”

When visiting an Egyptian museum exhibit several years ago, my wife and I noted how different the facial structures of the statues are. These are leaders, mind you, who were forever commemorated in stone. Pause. THINK. Ancient Egyptian ideas of race were so different from our 1400s-1900s skin tone idiocy that scholars can’t reliably reconstruct what “color” Egyptians were primarily. You know why? Because we made up that stupid stuff. Skin tone genuinely only means skin tone. Period. End of sentence. The dumb ideas that facial structure or production of melanin has any correlation to value, competency, work ethic, etc., HUMANS fabricated.
We take for granted that certain terrible realities “were always that way” and “always will be.” Well, they weren’t. And they don’t have to be. I heard a historian panel on NPR about how certain states and colonies had women voters/female property holders before the initial reach of our early federal government in the late 1700s. Yes, you read that right. Our country overtly took a step backward with its centralized formation, LONG before it simply stepped up AGAIN to reconsider equality.

I’m not here to debate. Just think about what this means. People brought about institutionalized racism and inequality. It wasn’t always. And it sure doesn’t just exist naturally. Yes, we create divisions. But they’ve varied over history.

More importantly, think about implications. The human mind created a lot of phony social structure. It can tear it down too.
And personally, within you, you’ve created a lot of phony “cans” and “can’ts.” You take them for granted. But your or others’ minds created them. You can tear them down. And you can build better ones.
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Let us build better ones.