Neat Trick

It is currently snowing in Hawaii.

Don’t you believe me? Do you live in Hawaii? Are you looking outside right now? Unless you can answer yes to both of those questions, then you can’t say I’m wrong. For all you know, it is snowing in Hawaii, very heavily. Volcanoes, long since dormant, are filling up to the brim with snow, and Hawaiians are snow boarding down their slopes, which eventually hit the water, turning their snow boarding into surfing, officially making Hawaii the coolest place to live with the coolest sport ever, Downhill Aqua Boarding.

Now, obviously, we all know it is very rare to see snow in Hawaii, and many people will say that the weather stations aren’t reporting anything like that. However, unless you are there right now, looking at it, you don’t know for sure. The weather station could have made a mistake, it’s been known to happen. You can’t see Hawaii to prove that it is still sunny and no snow can be found. So, according to your current perspective, there could very well be Hawaiians Aqua Boarding down volcano slopes.

Unless you look out your window, you can’t even prove that the outside world exists right now. As you are reading this, the outside world has come to a complete halt in your mind. All you know is in that room, everything else is a memory. You think the grass outside is still green, but you only know that because it was the last time you saw it. For all you know something happened to make it turn orange. In fact, your yard could be gone completely, assuming you even had one in the first place. Are there even lines on the roads anymore? What about the other rooms in the building? Are they still there? How do you know? You better check, they might not be.

It’s amazing how much we assume, simply because it’s how we left it, or it’s what we’ve been told. Religious people assume God exists. He may or may not, but everyone that is religious believes that He does. Why? Because they have been told so. The Bible says so. The preacher says so. Their friends say so. But they have no proof, other than that things exist, they had to come from somewhere, and this is the most logical explanation they have. God is a very touchy subject, so let’s use something else. You assume that the roads you drive on (or ride on if you take public transit) are there in the morning, when you are about to take them. They were there the last time you took them, so why not? But you don’t really know, do you? You think you do, but you don’t. You are working from past information.

You could be looking at an object, blink, and in the time it took you to blink, that object, in your mind, has moved from the present into the past. While you are blinking, you no longer know that object is there. For all you know, it vanished while you had your eyes closed. You only assume that it is there, while you are opening your eyes, because it was there a second ago, just before the blink.

You don’t think this could happen? How many times have you lost something?

“Well, gee, it was here a second ago…”

You lose things because they are no longer where you put them. However, to you, up until that moment, that item was in that exact spot. You knew it was there, and you were simply going to pick it up again. In the amount of time it took you to look away and look back, it moved. You were only assuming it was still there because you remembered it being there.

Let’s say someone told you where something was. You expect this info to be right because you trust this person. However, you go to this location, only to find out they are in error. Until that exact moment, you believed that this thing was in this place, when it actually was not. Your friend still believes that this thing is in this place. Technically, for the two of you, that thing is and is not there, at the same time. Isn’t that freaky?

Now that we've got that straightened out, happy Aqua Boarding, Hawaiians.