I’ll be the first to admit, I’m a skeptic. A big one. If I can’t see it, hear it, feel it, touch it and/or rationalize it, I’m probably not going to believe it until I can. And while I can’t remember most of my childhood, I know I’ve been this way most of my life. As a result, things like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Jesus, et al really never took up too much of my thought process (I realized that Santa Claus’s writing was the same as my Mom’s). It’s not that I didn’t want to believe, or that I don’t want to today. I really truly wish I could. I just need to be able to be honest with myself about whatever it is that I believe in.
So when I had my own kids who were having some of their own inner turmoil in realizing that there’s no real “magic” in the world, I give them this talk which has helped me in my life. How we know that nothing is impossible.
The way I look at it, if you can find one thing that is TRULY impossible, you can use it to define the subset of “impossible” things. Something like, Fairuza Balk stumbling on my site, falling in love with my picture and my writing and coming to track me down to ask me out. Or, Eli Manning hand-picking me to be his backup quarterback. You know, the kind of thing which isn’t a matter of “it’s currently impossible”, but “it’s impossible”.
I think everybody would agree that one such item that’s “impossible” is something coming out of nothing. That is, if you have a vacuum with no air, no gravity, no anything – And you suddenly made something appear in it, that would be believed to be an illusion (because it’s believed to be impossible). Another “impossible” item would be something having no beginning. That is, something having always existed. For infinity, but in reverse.
Willing to admit that those two things are impossible? Okay, good. Because the thing is, ONE of those two things had to have happened for you to be reading this right now. It HAS to be one of them. Because there are only two “how the Universe started” scenarios:
1) There was nothing. No time, no space, no anything at all. And then suddenly there was everything. An entire Universe of matter, anti-matter and all the rest just suddenly came into being.
2) Something always existed. Think back to what made the Universe. Gas? Dust? “Stuff”? Okay, what made that stuff? More gas? More dust? Okay, what made THAT stuff? If you follow it back, something either came out of nothing or something always existed.
One of those two things happened. There’s no other option. And both of those things are impossible. Therefore we can say that magic is real and nothing is impossible. Just really, REALLY unlikely sometimes.
(So just in case, Ms. Balk and/or Mr. Manning - My email is matt@brainscatters.com)
