Could it be that bringing new realities to life is a creative act, an act of imagination? Could it be an act of volition, rather than simple necessity?
When Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, was it because she needed a seat? "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired," she said. "But that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
Parks had been a civil rights activist for more than a decade before that historic day. When she kept her seat on the bus, she acted with will and intention to create a new future. She was part of a far-flung network of people who had joined together to bring new meaning to the ideals of justice and freedom, to redefine what was possible for American society, to attempt the impossible.
There was nothing modest about their undertaking. "I have a dream," Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In that same speech, he invoked "the fierce urgency of now" and decried "the tranquilizing drug of gradualism." Only from such a bold stance could he have uttered the words that echoed around the world and still ring in our hearts.
When we live into such a new way of being, our idea of what is possible is forever altered. As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, "One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."
And a society, once reimagined, grows toward that ideal, as a plant stretches upward toward the sun.