Minds we miss

I thought my first post would be a book review or something trivial from the back of my mind. But in the midst of what is going on in the world right now I can’t help but going places. Don’t get me wrong I don’t actually “go places”. What I mean is I go places in my head. I think about things I wanna do when this is over. I create hope by making plans. I imagine what world would look like. Will this all be different or will we forget about it and go back to our normal behaviours once the trauma of the events is passed. 

I don’t have answers to these questions, but I caught myself thinking that in my mind in these past three weeks I lived several lives. I imagined my next vacation. I imagined my son seeing the sea for the first time and even further, like the next place we’re going to live, or even next to next. And it made me think about people who are no longer with us. People who created an impact so big it makes you miss them in moments like these. And the person I thought about is Stephen Hawking.

Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist, who was early diagnosed with a rare neurodegenerative disease. He successfully graduated from both Oxford and Cambridge, was married, had three children and studied and worked in most prestigious universities, like Caltech. He developed and defended his ideas in fields of general relativity and quantum gravity. Some of you might know him as author of A Brief History of Time.

Stephen Hawking died in 2018. Four years before that a movie was made about his relationship with his wife, called A Theory of Everything.

If you look him up, you might find a lot of quotes by this great man, but the one that resonates me the most is this one:

"Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free"

I think I like it because it shows strength of character, limitless possibilities of our minds and how, if you really think about it, whatever is going on in the outside world, inside your mind you are free. You can be anywhere, be doing anything, feel however you like. And in the end of the day, isn't it what's most important? How you feel inside? Of course, it takes a lot of courage, vulnerability, self-awareness and will to accomplish this, but if you do that, it is a win. It is a win, because once you have mastered this, no matter what happens around you, you will always be able to create your own universe within your mind, and then from the inner space create all things beautiful and that will be your life.

So in the midst of such a hard time for our humanity, where we are trapped in the circumstances, I decided that in my mind I am free. And once I felt it, I felt a weight falling off my shoulders.