Imagine you are on a cruise. Life is easy and simple there floating in the great big vast ocean. There are things to do, luxuries of life to enjoy and pleasures to be had. But you can't help but feel restless.

"There are no challenges", you think, "No excitment! No danger!"

This, of course, is understandable, since the most exciting event of the day is usually when some little kid does a belly flop into the pool and your peaceful world of sunbathing is briefly perturbed. Then one night it all changed, you realise that the ship  is in fact sinking. You only notice it by chance, but once you do, there's no changing your mind, you have to get off. Curiously enough, no one else believes you and you are left to find a way off the ship by yourself. Now your life is something that you dreamed of, filled with excitement, the thrill of danger and challenges. Unforeseen hurdle after another, you perservere when finally the day came and you jump ship, leaving that life of endless floating behind.

Luckily, you planned ahead and crash land shortly after on a deserted island.

"Ah! The feeling of land! The sand between my toes!" you think in delight, "I have finally awakened from that boring dream!"

As you start exploring the land, you are discovered by a tribe living on this island. They are friendly and invite you into their fold. As you soon learn, all of the members were deserted here at different times, they made an agreement to band together in order to survive. And you soon realise that everyone puts in their all to help the tribe survive as a whole.

"This is a whole new way of life," you think with glee, "a much more exciting way of life."

At your second week on the island, one of the tribewomen who's been loosely in charge of you, pulls you aside and let's you in on something. Turns out that your tribe isn't the only one on the island, there are other tribes who want the land that you live on. The only way to protect yourselves is to understand the lay of the land better. Whoever has more knowledge of the land, will be able to better predict how things will turn out on the island. Knowledge here is power. Her job was this mountain on the northeast side of the island. Unfortunately she will be unable to continue in a few weeks, so the job has been decided by the head of the tribe to be passed down to you. She has already done a lot, but there is still much more to do.

Bust is your bubble of bliss, not only have you never surveyed land before, but you have no knowledge of how it is even done. The extent of your knowledge is that what stands before is a mountain. You are now only armed with your knowledge, previous acquired but completely irrelevant skills and experience to guide you.

And that is what my last year has been like. (minus all the metaphors)

As the snow starts melting away, I'm always reminded of something that I used to do as a kid with way too much imagination and even more alone time. I used to imagine that the piles and piles of snow that formed on the sidewalks, the sides of the road and in my backyard were not just mounds of ordinary ice crystals, but that they housed tiny invisible inhabitants whose size and lifespans were infinitesimal compared to ours.

They would live in the snow: in houses, apartments, condos, huts or other types of living quarters. They would have grocery stores, big malls, restaurants and movie theatres. They would have streets, avenues, highways, roads, and even alleys. They would spent their time like we do, working, playing, communicating, learning and loving those around them. The best part of this tiny world is that what we as people would see as just plain white snow made of just frozen water, would actually be so much more to them. Instead of being just white, at the scale of these tiny people, the snow would be a whole rainbow of colors, probably with names that haven't been made up. Instead of being just frozen water, the minerals and particles contained in the water would be considered their natural resources. They would mine the snow for it and used them for food, clothing, building materials, and various other things to buy and sell. Because they are so small, other piles of snow that were a certain distance away or not connected would be like the other planets to us, light years away. And similar to our world, they would also have natural disasters to ruin their perfect world. Instead of hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, typhoons and tornadoes, they would have disasters where a whole portion of their world and people would be taken away and moved, or a slew of large dirt particles would fall on their upper city, or a footprint sized are of their world would be crushed and would have to be rebuilt. Of course from their point of view, those would be unexplainable natural disasters that would randomly ravaged the world. They would live their short short lifespans, going thru generations and generations before one day the weather would get warm or rainy and the snow would melt and their world would once again disappear from ours.

Just something that I've been working on. Still in progress though. I'm still waiting to be wow-ed by it. :)


Let me know what you think. Thanks