An Infinite Number of Possibilities

As I sat in church on that summer Sunday morning my mind began to wander.  I don't recall the Minister being particulary boring, but I seldom really understood what he was saying.  Looking back, I wonder if a lot of the congregation did, but that is for another day and another piece of writing.

I didn't know it then, but my mind was beginning to ask it's own questions.  Not about God specifically, but about the universe or the world we live in, as was the topic that day.  My mind or should I say more specificallythe way I see and think seems to record in images that are linked with thoughts or voices I was listening to at the time.  It has a lot to do with something the theorists of education call 'visual-kinesthetic' or 'audio-visual'  learning.  My memory seems like a camera that takes a snapshot in time and labels it for storage.  What ever I was thinking that day is saved under that image.

Well, going back to that Sunday morning in church (must have been somewhere in the mid sixties) my mind had strayed elsewhere.  I started thinking in finite and infinite space.  I suddenly found myself trying to 'reach' the end of the universe.  When I imagined a wall that signified the limit, I immediately thought about the other side. This went on until I gave up.  I needed a finite answer and couldn't find one.  Looking back this was a beginning for me.  I got lost for a while in the finite.  Growing up, getting a job, falling in love, having a family and so on.  Yet as I got into my forties I began to question and to reassess what I held to be true and when I say question I mean everything.

My time as a mature student at University was a kind of dawn for me in the respect of questioning.  Half my teaching degree was in History and I spent a lot of time examining what was below the surface of what was written or said.

It took a while before I looked to the stars and began asking 'why' or 'what' but for me it opened up that 'finite' universe and with it my mind.  I love to dream of what is out there and for me it is a good thing if I ever get too full of self-importance.  After all, given the number of galaxies let alone the number of stars with planets in tow, it is no wonder we still struggle to find concrete evidence of extra terrestrial visits.  As far as that goes I can almost imagine a distant observer saying "very good, but come back in a few millennia when you've got something interesting for me to look at..."

I suppose it is a bit 'Star Trek' but the point I am laboring to explain is all about that Sunday morning and my place in it all.  The more I discover the less... I think you get the drift, but the change is my acceptance of the infinite, or at least as infinite as the universe can be from my perspective.  My mind can never be caged now.  Not whilst I have an ability to dream or reach out beyond that 'wall' of long ago.  I don't make images of aliens or even the worlds they might inhabit.  That 'wall' is now a doorway to infinity.  A bit like the lid on Schrodinger's box.  Except it is an endless list of possibilities that lie inside/beyond and I love it that way.