Braving new worlds: the astronaut in all of us

There are four versions of the world. They exist for everyone and we all move between them.

The first world is my world. The world inside my head, my inner world of thoughts and fears. What I’ve learned about this world is that I can make it a peaceful and verdant place. It doesn’t have to be a MadMax sort of rugged and dystopian Outback. I can make my inner world a pleasant and nurturing place instead of a scary place if I turn my inner critic into a coach.

The second world is the world of others. I have to inhabit someone else’s world to love and understand them. And I have to inhabit their world for someone to feel loved and feel understood. What makes this hard is that everyone else’s world is different, which makes getting there hard. It’s truly like being on a different planet. I feel this acutely with my children, in their worlds of cooking tomato pancakes or caning on pirate ships in our family room.

What I’ve learned about this world is that I will never ever spend too much time here. I will always spend less time than I need to in the worlds of others. If something feels tense, heated, or frustrating, there’s one obvious strategy every single time: walk around with them, in their world. Just be there for a little while before trying anything else. Doing this is never a waste of time.

The third world is the real world. The three dimensions in front of our face where our entire lives happen. Every hug and kiss, every swing of a tennis racket, every birthday cake, every wedding vow. Every misunderstanding and every karaoke night happens here. Every family dinner and scientific discovery - it all happens here. Whether or not we’re mentally there, our life, shared with everyone else, happens in the real world.

I’ve learned two things about this real world. One, things like meditation, prayer, and yoga - that help us to focus in the moment - are so important that it is difficult to overrate them. Anything we can do so help us stay in the moment is priceless.

Two, I’ve learned that it’s important to be honest instead of delusional. We can choose to accept the world as it is, or we can lie to about what’s real. We can see what we want to see, but then our reality is distorted. Distortion, I’ve found, is like drinking: the longer you let it ride, the worse the hangover.

We all travel from world to strange, new, world, and it honestly feels as significant as the spacefarers in movies like Star Trek or Star Wars. We are all astronauts in this way. It’s hard and scary.

And as I’ve penned this post, it just makes me remember how important it is to have grace. Grace for others as they trip up and fumble their way from their world into ours, and grace for ourselves as we try, feebly, to do the same. There’s nothing trivial about this travel from world to world. To be an astronaut in this life is significant and heroic.

But alas, there is still the fourth and final world. It is the world of our dreams - the sacred place. The world of dreams is the hardest to reach, requiring hope, vision, and optimism to find. The portal to the world of dreams is like the 9-and-three-quarters platform - only the indoctrinated can see it and it feels like something from a magical world. Because to dream is to imagine and to imagine is to contemplate something that has never been. To dream about the world that ought to be is to be an explorer in everyday life: dreaming is the act of charting something in our mind’s eye, that no other astronaut has ever seen.

I learned my most important lesson about dreaming from Chief Craig and the leaders I worked for at the Detroit Police Department: we have to talk about our dreams.

For the dream to come true, what I see in my minds eye, you have to see in yours. Without doing this we cannot work toward the same dream.

To be sure, this is uncommonly hard. In our stressed out world, finding the wherewithal to dream on our own is hard. Guiding someone else to meet you there, in that holy plane, is even harder.

So if the universe or our creator blessed us enough to get to the plane of dreams, why would we do anything but dream the biggest, simplest dream we could? To dream big and simple is the most rational choice one can make.

All this inspires me. That we all traverse and inhabit these different worlds inspires. That we all have something in us that allows us to think beyond our own world inspires me. That we are all astronauts, inspires me.

We just have to find the astronaut within, and explore the have the courage to explore these new worlds.