3. seven billion

"She could imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a clean block of lined paper and her marbled, Bakelite fountain pen. She could see the simple sentences, the accumulating telepathic symbols, unfurling at the nib’s end. She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.

- Atonement, Ian McEwan"

My brain can't comprehend that there are more than 7 billion minds in the world today, much less that there are 7 billion minds who are as real and alive as mine is to me. It's incredibly difficult to put into perspective the thought that these people have minds that work in wondrous ways that I will never know of just because they are not mine. I'm an intuitive person and it's quite easy for me to empathise with others. But feelings and emotions are so different to the actual workings of a mind just because it's impossible to ever think in way that wasn't purposely thought of by yourself. I'm not making sense.

I started thinking about how there are so many unique and creative and special minds and yet we don't make the effort to know as much as we can. We are all so stuck in our own worlds, so determined to figure things out in our own way and we're convinced we know best. But we don't. It frightens me just how much knowledge and wisdom other people have and how amazingly rich my own thoughts would be if only I could learn a little bit from every person I meet.

This is not just the writer in me dribbling on, or even the idealist. This is the human speaking, shouting, I want to learn! I want to be inspired by their stories, I want to learn from their mistakes and admire their achievements. I want to hear them spoken from their own lips or written in their own handwriting and I want them to share it with the world.

Because what is a world with 7 billion people and everyone keeping what they know to themselves? How can we even sit here, in a classroom, in an office, going through slow, dull routine, learning the same things, being tested the same way when we are quite clearly not the same people.

There is a whole world out there full of exciting, different minds who know things you don't and don't know things you know very well.

While it may take a bit more time for my little brain to really wrap around the notion that there are other brains just as alive as mine (thanks Ian), I do know now that I want to learn and I want to do so through the amazing people I share this crazy world with.