#childlike thoughts

When I was a kid, I would ride in the backseat of the family car and quietly watch the blinking white stripes pass along the side of the car as we drove past.  Or if it wasn't the stripes catching my attention, it was the way that power lines would rise and fall, as if they were alive when your moving.  

It was in these mesmerizing car riding times that my most profound thoughts would bubble up and sneak into my brain.  My developing noodle was already coming to experiment with the thought that there might be alternate worlds, co-existing in the same time as me.  There were, perhaps, parallel and alternate universes.

Huge.

As a 5 year old, it is hard to imagine beyond the relative 5-minute past and the 5-minute future- much less anything happening outside of the immediate, velour back seat.  But I was bound and determined to unravel this knot in my logic and understand this budding hypothesis. 

No one had yet taught me the language or notions for anything existential or otherworldly, so I was at a loss to describe to anyone what was rattling in my noggin.  

I began to create my own methods for describing and understanding what was percolating in my head.   My simple logic at the time would lead me to begin crafting my paralleled universe theory through the only other *community* that I could think of: ants. 

It was pure genius, or so I still think, to use the world of ants to help describe my coexisting systems.  I mean-- I had an ant (aunt) and well, there lived tons of ants and aunts all around my world.  If that wasn’t parallel, I didn’t know what was.

I had this vision in my head that as I was riding down the road, that there was this little ant-family and ant-me, doing the exact same thing- in a little ant-car of course.

As I grew older, I realized that perhaps my ant theory wasn’t exactly holding up against all other since-gained knowledge and logic because ants didn’t have automobile factories or assembly line workers. 

But what I did come away with was a true, honest, and early-instilled faith that there was something out there, tumbling and thinking through its own existence and wondering what other little ant-selves were doing in that exact, same moment- existing.