THE SAD GIRL THAT SAILED TO SAMOA

 

This is a story told by Neville told about a very sad young girl who dreaded going home on Christmas eve to an empty house.

So, you might be asking yourself, why did she dread going home? 

And the reason is that she had lost her dad in an accident that same year. 

So it was late at night, and it was raining, and this sad young girl who had just turned 17 was returning home and she was overcome with grief and sadness. She was untrained in anything and the only job that she managed to get herself was as a waitress and it seemed like she had worked herself late into the night.

As she is returning home, she's in a streetcar that is filled with happy boys and girls who are quite eager and excited to return home on a Christmas vacation. This girl must've felt like the saddest person on earth when she saw how excited everyone was about going home and meeting their family and she couldn't stop herself from crying. 

So, she stuck her face in the rain so that her tears could freely mingle with the rain and she wished that she was somewhere else. Somewhere far away from home, to be precise the island of Samoa. 

However, that was the point that she stopped wishing and what she did next was a pure act of creation because she went into her wonderful human imagination and she created a different circumstance for herself and she experienced it like it was happening in real-time.

There is a huge difference between wishing for something and using the power of your imagination to create it, and this is something that I'm going to cover in detail later on.

Back to our story, the girl is crying and while she's holding the rail of the streetcar, she says to herself, "This is not rain but spray from the ocean, and this is not the salt of tears that I taste, but this is the salt of the sea in the wind, and this is not San Diego, this is a ship and I'm coming into the bay of Samoa."

While heading home to doom and gloom, this girl decided to experience a new reality in great vividness in her imagination and she saw herself so far away from home sailing in a ship and approaching Samoa instead of heading home in a streetcar.

At the end of the journey, everyone disembarked from the streetcar and she went home then, 10 days later she received a letter from this firm in Chicago. Neville didn't elaborate what kind of a firm it was but I'm guessing it was a law firm.

This letter said that her aunt who left for Europe several years before had deposited with them three thousand dollars and gave the instructions that if she didn't return to America the sum of money should be paid to her niece. The letter further said that they had just received news of her aunts' death and they were now acting on her instructions.

One month later this girl sailed into the bay of Samoa and she experienced exactly the same thing she had experienced a month before. As she came into the bay it was late at night, it wasn't raining but there was a spray of the sea in the wind and she could taste the salt of the sea just like she had tasted her tears.

Imagination vs Wishing

Many people don't really understand the difference between unleashing the creative power of the human imagination and simply wishing or daydreaming. They think those two things are one and the same thing. 

Imagination is the stuff of creation it's where everything originates from. When an engineer is designing a building, or a car, or an aircraft, or any type of a machine what they're doing is directly utilizing the creative power of the human imagination. Under these circumstances we can't say that the engineer is wishing or daydreaming, he/she is at work, busy translating something only visible to them in their own imagination and bringing it forth into the physical reality.

I did a quick search for the word wish on google.

 

As clearly evident from these definitions, wishing for something is simply wanting or hoping or desiring something that you know will probably not happen. It's a self-imposed barrier because we're the ones who believe it cannot happen. 

What if we believed otherwise and believe that the thing we wish is attainable? Can you still call that desire a wish?

To give you an example, let's look at one of the most famous stories in aviation - the story about the Wright brothers who invented the first-ever powered aircraft. Prior to the breakthrough invention that changed humanity forever, these two brothers worked on bicycles and printing presses. 

The two brothers only had high school education and the only engineering background they had was what they'd learn from repairing bicycles and printing presses, that's all.

I'm quite sure that there were smarter people than them at the time, there had to be more qualified engineers and scientists and really brilliant inventors. But what was the problem here?

All these smart people believed that it was impossible for a craft heavier than air to fly. That was the problem. That was their self imposed limitation. To them, the idea of building a flying machine was only but a wish. 

But these two ordinary brothers believed that their dream was possible and they went into their wonderful human imagination and they got to work and brought their desire to fruition.

From the dawn of time, man has always had a desire to fly but it couldn't come to fruition because it had only been a wish.

I have read the story of the Wright brothers a million times and the thing that captivates me every time was how they meant business from the very start. They weren't fooling around like most of the people before who had tried to build flying machines. They were sure of what they were doing, they built models, they built a wind tunnel, they did extensive tests and finally built the first airplane and flew it with the same confidence. 

You have to understand that a lot of people had lost their lives building and flying their own machines and attempting to fly like birds. So, it was an achievement in both directions.

The Wright brothers believed the vision and they made it come true.

Belief is the magic sauce of creation

When the sad girl was in the streetcar heading home, she saw herself in her imagination being somewhere else, somewhere far from home and she believed it. The most important word here is belief.

She believed what she was seeing in her imagination to be true just like the Wright brothers believed that they could build a flying machine from the idea they had in their imagination, they had no proof that they could do it nor did they have any prior experience but they believed it was possible and it became true. Now that is the act of pure creation at work.

When you get yourself in a state akin to sleep and you're visualizing your desire, if you don't believe that what you're seeing in your imagination is true or even possible, then you're wasting your time because there is no difference between what you're visualizing and a wish.

We all know that a graphic designer or an artist or a musician or an engineer gets paid to imagine things. They're paid to come up with new ideas never seen in this reality. We can't say that they're paid to wish for things or daydream because that is simply not true. They're paid to utilize their human imagination to design things and bring them to fruition where everyone can appreciate. 

You can do that too and you can bring every single desire that you have into fruition if you only knew the power that you possess, the power of the wonderful human imagination and the power of belief in the unseen.