Explorers

It is interesting how perspective changes over time, and we suddenly are able to see things in a new light. When we were in school, we learned that centuries ago, explorers set out from Europe to try and discover whether the earth was flat or what they would find if they kept sailing west.

However, it would be more accurate to call these franchise developments. After all, when the old European powers found land somewhere, they declared them to be colonies of theirs. The obvious fact that someone else was already living there means that these entrepreneurs did not really discover those lands. And those developments were not really about simply finding more land to build homes on. It was all about sending back things to the home country that could produce revenue. Think, for example, of the early British explorers as the ones who got the tobacco franchise (Walter Raleigh) for all of Europe. Or other bands of explorers who secured chunks of land and positions for themselves as furriers (Hudson Bay Company) for Europe. You know what all those scuba divers busy searching for sunken ships? What were they loaded with that would make people want to scrounge around the ocean floor for years? Gold. These people were not just out there to see what was out there.

Explorers come in different varieties. There are explorers whose curiosity just drives them to want to know what is down there, deep in the ocean, or out there in space how the human brain works, what makes plants grow the way they do, the nature of romance, life after death, and other mysteries.

We can open ourselves to discovery simply by considering different perspectives. One of the starter ideas I used to give my creative writing students was to write a story that toyed with the idea of how we might have developed differently as a society if we would have taken up a native way of living, rather than continuing with the European model. Our culture and our country could have gone a whole different way.

When we explore what possibilities the world has for us, particularly when we are looking for ways to make money, we have to look at different perspectives to find our way. We might find ourselves sailing into uncharted waters to see if there is anything there. What we find depends upon how observant we are.