In Stephen Pastis’ comic strip Pearls Before Swine the other day, ever-optimistic Pig is writing a letter.
“Dear The World as I Know It,” he writes, “Be the world as I envision it. P.S. And please have ice cream grow on trees.”
He turns to Rat and says, “Never hurts to ask.”
It’s a variation on the exhortation often attributed to Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” If you seek a world in which more people love their neighbors, well then, love your neighbors.
Someone has already envisioned a world where ice cream grows on trees — a simple search found a couple of companies that sell ice cream created from coconut cream. I think Pig envisioned something a bit more literal, but you take what you can get.
Of course, our world, the sum total of what the other 7 billion should are doing, is pretty much out of our individual control, but we have total control of how we react and interact with that world.
Oh, I was sorely tempted a couple of times yesterday. Facebook friends share their political posts, and I agree with some and intensely disagree with others. I started typing a response to one of the especially silly ones and then thought of Pig’s letter to the world as he knows it.
In the world I envision, people are free to say and believe what they want and, as long as they’re not trying to run my life, let it be. And so I deleted my response — I wasn’t going to change my friend’s mind anyway.
And ice cream growing on trees is a more interesting subject.
