Of Human Imagination

My mother spent two years dying of cancer in a bedroom upstairs in our house. I said good-bye to her every morning when I went to kindergarten. When the cancer got worse, I could only kiss one side of her mouth.
I wanted to be a ‘space scientist’, by which I meant an astronomer. I grew up in DC where it took me years to identify the Big Dipper, because I could only see two of its stars through the light pollution. I liked the stars because they were so orderly—they showed up reliably in certain places at certain times. It seemed possible to understand and predict the motion of the stars.
The people around me, on the other hand, were a mystery. In college, I read about Harry Harlow’s studies of rhesus monkeys, where he raised some without real mothers. The motherless monkeys did not understand how to behave around other monkeys.
I was one of Harlow’s motherless monkeys. Other people were sending me signals, but I couldn’t read them. Perhaps that is why I became a psychologist instead of an astronomer.

Each human being is a universe. We can imagine worlds, things that might be, futures that could not be—that defy all physical laws. In our imaginations, we can fly, live forever, find the perfect lover, torture our enemies—be the hero of our own story.
Imagination can be deadly—can keep one person from seeing that another lives in a universe of dreams, hopes and aspirations, too. On September 11, 2001, a few fanatics turned airplanes into missiles. These terrorists were living in an imagined world, in which killing of this sort was virtuous, in which they would go to their version of heaven.
Perhaps if we understood that each time we pulled a trigger or set off a bomb, we were destroying a universe as beautiful and sophisticated as our own, we would hesitate. But of course, if we have been taught to hate ourselves, to regard ourselves as worthless, then what does it matter?

I was in a hotel lobby one evening many years ago, at a convention—displaced from friends and family in that impersonal space that could be anyplace. A man stumbled out of the bar, smoking—a habit I abhor--slouched in a chair and fell asleep. He was nicely dressed, but clearly homeless in a sea of affluence. My ordinary response would have been irritation, perhaps a little pity—but as I saw him, something reminded me that he was a baby once, and suddenly I felt sorrow—not just for him, but for all of us, and what we had become.

"Whosoever saves a single life, saves an entire universe." (Yad Vashem award)