What if?

 

"She woke up at the screeching sound of her alarm clock. She got dressed, had breakfast, and got in her red little Volkswagen. She checked her hair and makeup on the rear view mirror, something she usually wouldn't have done, but today was special. She took her usual route around town, heading for her office, keeping an eye on the digital clock on the dashboard so that she wouldn't be late on this special day. She saw the green traffic light in the distance with only a few seconds remaining, and she knew she had to get that. She increased the throttle, shifted gear, got on the left lane, and whizzed through the intersection just in time. What she didn't see was the swerving small Prius, which just missed the trunk of her car by a fraction of a second. She got to work on time, the elevator was right there, and headed up to the executive floor! She never would've thought this day would come. She knew her hair and makeup were fine, she confidently strode into the meeting room, and they closed the door after she got in."

Cabin pressure-stablizer? Check. Frontal warp engines? Check. Seatbelts? Check. Jumping to light speed, tearing through the fabric of time…

"She woke up at the screeching sound of her alarm clock. She got dressed, had breakfast, and got in her red little Volkswagen. She checked her hair and makeup on the rear view mirror, something she usually wouldn't have done, but today was special. She took her usual route around town, heading for her office, keeping an eye on the digital clock on the dashboard so that she wouldn't be late on this special day. She saw the green traffic light in the distance with only a few seconds remaining, and decided it wasn't worth it. She would get the next one.  She pressed the brakes, shifted gear, and halted at the intersection. Just as she stole a glance at the rear view mirror to make sure her briefcase was on the back seat, a swerving small Prius came out of the intersection, and crashed into her red little Volkswagen. From that moment on, her day was a day-time nightmare. She had to call the insurance company, had to reason with a clearly hungover guy, got to work late, and by the time she had darted up the stairs to the meeting room because the elevator was stuck on the executive floor, she was tired, sweaty, her hair was all messed up, and the meeting had already started. There goes the good first impression, she thought."

Don't you wonder what your life would have been like if you'd took that job offer in Germany? Or if you'd  bought a house on the suburbs rather than one in the city? Or if you'd eaten cereal for breakfast this morning?

Every second, we make decisions. I decide to write this blog post now rather than going to sleep. You decide to read this blog post, rather than dismissing it as the ramblings of  a teenager and going to the kitchen to get dinner. And every single decision we make changes the course of our lives, whether that change is so drastic that you die in the next three seconds, or you just don't see a specific stranger on the street that day. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could trace back the branches of life and take another road to see how our lives would have turned out? If only we had a TARDIS...

Of course, the idea of parallel universes does have its glitches. If a new universe is created with every decision someone makes, then there would be an infinite number of parallel universes, one for each decision one of us -among the 7.134 billion- makes. And, why shouldn't dogs and cats have parallel universes? What's so special about humans that WE get the parallel universes, and the heavens and the gods?

The countless number of movies made and books written on this issue of parallel universes only strengthen the hollow yet unnecessarily widely supported narcissistic set of mind, putting humans on top of every other species, and accepting -knowing- that we are special... somehow. Still, it would be cool to take up my De Lorean for a trip to another layer of time where, 300 million years ago, some curious fish on a planet called "the Earth" decided to remain in water and hadn't migrated onto land to begin life on land as we know it... What if?

Murphy's Law? Maybe.

Yesterday, I performed at a concert. And until the moment I got up on the stage (I was the last to go, by the way), I practically lived the statement "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong".

The concert was organized by my piano teacher and she wanted her students to give a concert. She asked me if I would play in it. I said, "Gladly!". She asked me if I had anything to do that Tuesday night, May 7th. I thought about it for a while, and the date rang the bell: math exam, Ding! Luckily, the test was on Tuesday, so I didn't have any studying to do that night. Anyway. She told me that the rehearsal would be at 18:00. I told her that I come from school around 17:00 and I could easily make it... Haha.

So Tuesday came rolling, I took the painfully hard calculus exam, and was excited the whole day for the concert that night. I got on the bus, and because of the people who took the bus that day, I  realized that I would be dropped off 3rd from the last.

But that was just the beginning.

The road we normally take was unusually and incredibly crowded and a jogging turtle could have passed us for a while there.

When it was finally my turn to get dropped off, the bus driver "forgot" I was in the bus and missed the turn which lead to my street. I had to ride along in the bus until he dropped off the remaining three people.

I finally got home, ate some stuff so fast I couldn't taste it, fixed myself an outfit, splashed on some makeup, and we were getting in a cab at 18:10.

Oh, what's that?

Some people tried to take charge and are running around yelling shallow slogans with banners in their hands, so the police closed off a street.

Some genius city planner decided to work on the asphalt in one of the main arteries at the place I was going to, so bye-bye free flowing traffic!

It took us 30 minutes to go somewhere we would've gone in 10 minutes any other day.

Now, I don't want to commit any logical fallacies or anything, but, if all of these weren't Murphy's Laws alive in flesh and blood, what were they?

Of course, I would not notice the jammed traffic every other day when I did not have a concert to get to.

I would not care so much if the bus driver had forgotten to drop me off any other day. So maybe, just because today I had somewhere and some event I had to get to, because I searched for misfortunes all along the way, I noticed these stuff.

Nonetheless, something, maybe a decision I made or maybe the fluttering of a butterfly's wings on the top of a skyscraper in Shanghai caused me to be late to that concert. I don't know what was at work that day, but that chaotic afternoon was far from normal... Murphy's Law? Maybe.

Imagining Some Fear

"...Ben walked slowly away, his heart a thudding drum in his chest. Yes, he was sweating; he could feel it trickling down from his forehead, his armpits, matting the hair on his chest. He looked up and saw Pennywise the Clown standing at the top of the lefthand staircase, looking down at him. His face was white with greasepaint. His mouth bled lipstick in a killer's grin. There were empty sockets where his eyes should have been. He held a bunch of balloons in one hand and a book in the other. Not he, Ben thought. It. I am standing here in the middle of the Derry Public Library's  rotunda on a late-spring afternoon in 1985, I am a grown man, and I am face to face with my childhood's greatest nightmare. I am face to face with It. 'Come on up, Ben,' Pennywise called down. 'I won't hurt you. I've got a book for you! A book . . . and a balloon! Come on up!"

This exquisite passage you just read is by Stephen King, the great author of horror novels, and is from his fiction work, It.

As I read this passage for the first time, in bed, with the lights turned low at late in the night, with the house creepily living on around me with no intention of falling asleep, I felt the same as Ben Hanscom. The sweat, the fear, the anxiety, the horror; and this was all thanks to the incredibly vivid descriptions by Stephen King, fruits of his teeming imagination.

Without King's imagination, there would be no horror in that passage. I would not start to look at clowns as I've never done before. I wouldn't close my eyes and see Pennywise the Clown, probably completely different from what King had in mind when he wrote that passage. Because as I read the passage, I blend that description with my own imagination, and create something totally different. Still horrifying, but in another way; horrifying for me.

This is why I believe it is safe to agree with the greatest mystery writer of all time, the inventor of the logical, arrogant, neat, socially-awkward "consultant" Sherlock Holmes; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, on his saying,"when there is no imagination, there is no horror."

We cannot be afraid of something that does not exist in our minds.

Can a 3-year-old be afraid of a nuclear war starting, or an earthquake?

They are more likely to be horrified by the idea of slimy, forever-famished, hideous creatures, "monsters", I believe that's what they call them, hiding under their beds, sneakily waiting until they fall asleep, into the deep and wondrous world of dreams, and just linger their arms over the edge...

The moment we think of something, it spurs into life, instantaneously, and, unfortunately, you cannot hit "delete".

What the monster in It does is that it reads the minds of the children and takes the form of the thing they're most afraid of. The thing they imagined would harm them. The thing they think is hiding in their closet. For Ben, it was a mummy. For Eddie Kaspbarak, it was a werewolf.

Shakespeare wrote, in his play A Midsummer Night's Dream, that a lunatic, a lover and a poet all have different imaginations and comprehend the world differently; while the lover sees "a gypsy as the world's most beautiful woman", the madmen sees "hell" and "devils", all the while the poet "shapes" what he sees into immortal words, seeing something to write about in "airy nothing". And all of these people, with their crazy imaginations colossally different from each other, can easily perceive a "bush" as "a bear" in the night, by "imagining some fear".

Without our imaginations, we wouldn't have anything to be afraid of; we would not have a great machine behind our wondering eyes, restlessly imagining and recording things; spawning horrible thoughts, scary animals, worst-case-scenarios. King "imagines some fear" of his own, and puts them on paper masterfully, allowing us to "imagine" some horror for ourselves; people who read the passage in the beginning of this blog post fear completely different things. Now that you've read the passage, and imagined your own fear,  it's up to you to decide whether you are the lunatic, the lover, or the poet.

I Want My Hour Back

60 minutes, 3600 seconds,

I lost my hour,

I want my hour,

Give it back.

 

Today, I lost an hour because of the summer time application; "Better utilization of the day hours!"

An hour I would have perhaps used to study for the physics exam on Wednesday.

An hour I would have perhaps used to finish The Shire Theme arrangement for the piano I've been working on for two weeks-more like planning to work on for two weeks.

An hour I would have perhaps used to SLEEP.

And where has it gone?

Just thrown away into the space, the endless void beyond the stars we see at night?

Time does that to you. It confuses you, it creates problems we really don't need right now.

Time passes. Only it passes slower when I'm in math class, and faster when I'm in physics or music. Or it doesn't really "pass" when we're asleep. We close our eyes, it is dark, we open them, it is day, and the only crumbs of memory we have are dreams, flashing, vivid pictures, which are seconds long. What happened to the rest of the time?

Time travel is another issue of concern. If it was invented in the future, we would have known by now, because a man in a space suit with six fingers on each of his hand would've stumbled into the middle of the Walmart claiming he is from the future.  One of my favorite movie series is Back to the Future, in which whatever Marty does affects his life in the future, as he tries to get back to it.

They cannot really explain how time works, and how it seems to take FOREVER for the video game to load, but it seems like it has only been 10 minutes since you've started playing it, when in reality it has been five hours. And today, I lost an hour of sleep, fun and doing homework (funny how those two words ended up together). I literally lost it. Now it is 12:52 PM, and I need to get started on studying history, studying the events of the time past, studying the events which might have happened right where I'm sitting right now, the battle of Sakarya, the establishment of the first parliament in Ankara... Same place, different people, different times. It is just like another layer, another world...

Just to confuse you a little more, before I get back to the present and the future, here's a question: If I went back in time and somehow caused my grandmother and grandfather to never meet, what would happen?

 

Spice It Up

"...George drove to work in his red Chevrolet, just like every morning, listening to the news presented by the lady who's voice he found particularly soothing, followed by the weather report and some smooth jazz. As he turned right at the intersection, which would be followed by two more left turns and a right turn, he thought he saw a bright, white dot in the sky. Ignoring it on purpose, mistakenly thinking that it was just a trick his now-36-year-old eyes were playing on him, he went about his daily route. When he turned the second left, the street did not reveal half a dozen of brick buildings on each side, with suburban cars parked in the street like it did every morning, but the very image of disaster: his eyes first went to the brick buildings -of which there were only 2 left standing and recognizable- and the slimy stuff stuck on them, then to the cars, flipped over and tossed about the street randomly, the one Bugatti Veyron he admired everyday as he passed it in his humble little car, imagining himself riding that car one day, only slightly distinguishable among the wreckage by its still shiny logo, scorched around the edges, and finally to the great, grey, gigantic machine hovering above the street, shooting laser beams, with nothing his engineering school-trained-eyes could recognize midst the hunk of grey metal. With the blink of an eye, his red Chevrolet was also hovering in the air, up towards the Great Machine, and he began thinking of all the times he switched the channel when a sci-fi movie with alien abductions came on because he thought they were silly, and how there could not possibly be anything human about this, at all."

Yes, I know that there are as many solar systems just like ours in the universe as the number of tiny sand particles in the whole world added up, and, yes, I know that the possibility of intelligence life out there is very high, and yes, that "aliens" do not leave slimy stuff behind them, as they are not Slimers, but, wouldn't it be nice to always live with a touch of the supernatural?

Today was a typical Monday. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, and as I rode home in the bus, I thought, "Wow, it sure would be nice if something different happened today". I don't necessarily mean alien invasion when I say "different". Just something would be enough: the bus taking a different route, a huge storm appearing out of nowhere, seeing a fox in the middle of the city, seeing a double rainbow.

Nobody, except maybe superheroes, live lives which are different every single day. Every one has a routine and monotone life, no matter how much they ignore it or refuse it. So, I've found a way to make things more amusing, after going to the same school for 12 years, through the same road, with the same people; thinking outside the box and sprinkling in a bit of the supernatural to everyday events. When I see that the traffic lights are not functioning, I try to think up the most absurd scenario, with, for example, an alien ship jamming the signals of the traffic lights.

It may sound crazy, but to deal with life and make it just a tiny bit more amusing, using your imagination and not being afraid of the supernatural is the best choice. Of course, it wouldn't be so bad to see a unicorn once in a while, you know, just to spice it up.

"Controlled Craziness"

"Imagination is more important than knowledge".

I will stand by this statement made by Albert Einstein until the end of time.

Because, with knowledge, you can only do so much. There are boundaries, rules, facts and information you have to abide to. You can't just ignore them. On the other hand, with imagination, there are no boundaries, there are no rules. In fact, the only boundary you have is your own creativity. Using imagination, you can create something that is not there, you can see things that cannot be seen by other people, you can hear music in silence.

Nobody knows what really goes on inside this crazy pink glob of matter we call our "brain".

You  may know everything there is to know about music theory, but without imagination, you will never become a Mozart or Wagner. You may know every known technique about drawing and painting, but without imagination, you will never become a Monet or Dali.

[caption id="attachment_210" align="alignright" width="253"] Earth according to Hindu Mythology.[/caption]

I am pretty sure that the people of earlier ages were way, way more creative and thus much more imaginative. It takes imagination to look up at the starry night sky and connect five stars so that they resemble a woman, and call it Andromeda, a queen who was banished into the sky for being very arrogant and self righteous. Now what people see when they look up at the exactly same night sky as the Ancient Greeks looked up into and saw all of the people, animals and stories in, is "galaxies" and "stars", not queens and beasts and scorpions.  Also, much earlier, people believed that the Earth stood on elephants standing on a turtle which moves very slowly. I personally believe that the people who thought this up are much more valuable than the 4.0 GPA, genius, skeptical people working in NASA.

Yesterday in our discussion in class, one of my friends defined imagination as "controlled craziness". This is the best definition I've ever heard of imagination. Because, in any other case, looking outside the plane window and seeing a wicked, cringing creature with eyes as dark as the night sky standing on the wing, would be called "craziness", not "imagination".

Imagination is looking at the moon we see everyday and seeing a Death Star. Imagination is getting carried away in a science fiction novel written by your mind after looking at the descending mist or on Halloween. Imagination is being able to see a giant hunter raised to the skies with the scorpion he killed by looking at just a few, twinkling stars, which are in reality, at colossally different places in the universe, with no connection between them what-so-ever, but, who cares about reality?