Sometimes I stumble upon strange side roads within my mind and wonder how it is that I have passed them by for so long without giving them a second glance. I stare down them, sometimes seeing no further than the quick turn into the thicket, but other times I must gather my binoculars to gaze at the distant mountains and fallow fields in which ideas have not yet been sown. I have recently uncovered an odd dirt path which runs like a country road in Kansas, that is, the distance it could cover is vast and seemingly empty, but great ideas and discoveries await on that road. It lays hidden within my head by the rose bushes of fate's certainty and the over-bearing light of free will. I believe I have overlooked this lazy lane because it may never have occurred to me to look at anything else but sunlight, petals, and thorns. Until today. Today I have tentatively trodden upon a path most unusual and fresh, but one that carries with it the sense of great wonder and potential. What is it that I've discovered here, you ask? Why something that seems so obvious to some that I do wonder at my own ability to observe at all.

My epiphany today was that history has never been lived before, that time in linear, that we have never seen today what we have seen in the past. That when we talk of rising gas prices, or of global warming, or genocide in Sudan, and refugees in Burma, we have never really spoken of these things before. We're not gabbing over old news, but debating over things that are ripe and ready for the picking, a harvest no farmer or politician could have imagined a century ago, or even 5 years ago. Our government officials have no more sense of the future than we, no more understanding of what will come than street corner gamblers and tarot card readers. They, like we, make guesses, some estimated, some conservative, some hopeful, but all simply guesses. We are still like the hunters-gatherers of old; we track our quarries through guess work and observation and pattern making. We aren't sure about global warming, but we can take a stab in the dark and say we're more sure of that stab than we are of another.

This road goes on and on and for some it may have been seen before, but for me, I find it exciting and exotic. It tastes like a foreign fruit and hums like a fading harmonica.