There was a game my siblings and I would play when we were kids. It was a good way to pass the time while Mom ran errands, or when we were “focusing” on chores. The game would always start with the same question.
“What if there was no such thing as…?”
And then we would name a letter. Like “S.”
“Ooh. Then there would be no school!”
“Yes, but there would also be no snacks.”
“Or sandwiches.”
“Or salami.”
“I don’t think I’d miss salami.”
“How about saliva? How would we eat?”
“It wouldn’t matter. There’d be no safety. We’d all die.”
“No sharks, though.”
“Or sand.”
“Or sand.”
“Or swimming.”
“Or saints.”
“Well that would be bad.”
“Literally. I could live without socks, though.”
“But you couldn’t have shoes either.”
“We’re back to ‘no safety’ again.”
“At least Mom wouldn’t be short anymore.”
“Oh, but I’d miss her smile.”
And so forth. It was a fun game, and I think my parents enjoyed hearing us practice our letters. More than wordplay, though, for me the game was always about imagining a different world, often an impossible one, where the rules would have to be different and even familiar things would have to take on new meanings if they wanted to survive. Contradictions were welcome and contributed to the fun. It was an exercise of the imagination that encouraged us to make sense out of nonsense and order out of chaos.
I never realized that when I became an adult, I’d be entering a world premade to demand such exercises of the imagination. We’re expected to imagine things we can’t see all the time. We imagine that the world is really full of good people, even though the news only talks about the bad ones. We imagine that giving a homeless man a few dollars is going to do him some good, even though we know it might not. We imagine a broken heart was not a wasted effort, even if that is exactly what it feels like at the time.
We move through this world of things as they are by focusing on things as they might be, as we hope they someday can be. A refusal to accept the present as eternal, in favor of some better thing we dare imagine for ourselves, is only possible because of worlds that don’t exist. Before we can even show faith in such worlds we have to have the imagination to hope for a world that, to put it frankly, only exists in our minds and hearts. Having conceived such a world, we immediately become enabled to start building it.
So this Thanksgiving I’m thankful for nonexistent worlds. Bright, beautiful worlds that we can only imagine now, but which are real enough to make us live better, more hopeful lives. Just because such worlds don’t exist here and now, doesn’t mean they don’t exist somewhere and somewhen. Perhaps not very far away either. Perhaps just close enough to make a difference.
