Wishful Thinking

“Wish on everything. Pink cars are good, especially old ones. And stars of course, first stars and shooting stars. Planes will do if they are the first light in the sky and look like stars. Wish in tunnels, holding your breath and lifting your feet off the ground. Birthday candles. Baby teeth.”
~ Francesca Lia Block~

We are wishers. We love to make wishes and have a thousand ways of making them. Wishes are really just hope and hope is the very thing that keeps us breathing one day to the next. Without hope we would lay down and expire. We would disappear from our own lives and then we would disappear from the lives of others. So we make wishes, in the form of prayer and meditation, in the form of chanting, in the form of blowing on an over ripe dandelion, or the toss of a penny into a fountain, and we hope for those wishes to come true. We hope for more hope.

I am never sure if my wishes really come true or that life simply worked out the way it was supposed to work out. And if my wishes didn’t work out where did  my wishing words they go?  Did they just float off into nowhere and are now stuck in the branches of trees or were they what cause the occasional transformer to blow on the power pole outside my door? And the ones that did come true? Were they granted by a benevolent God, or a kind, much-alive universe that just wants me to spin along with it into eternal happiness? Or could be that my wishes came true simply because while wishing, I visualized a reality that I was then able to create?  I know I have wished on countless stars, made promises to be a better person if, “just this one time”, my wish or prayer would come true. It’s funny, but while I know that many of my wishes must have worked out, I can’t always remember the details of specific wishes or their outcomes. Perhaps a wish journal is needed. A way to visibly track requests and results. If I had some data then maybe I could sort it all out and determine if wishing, hoping, praying, is even worth the time. I could spend my remaining years gathering data, putting it all into columns with calculations based on successes and failures. I could then run it through a computer algorithm and spit out some facts that would tell me if wishing is simply hopeless or incredibly hopeful.

But honestly, I think I already know an answer that no computer would be able to give. And I already mentioned it at the start of this little piece. Wishes ARE HOPE and hope is like the very air we breath. They are as real as the inhaling and exhaling of billions of humans in a beautiful dance of life on a blue planet that is often brutal in nature. We hope for so many things, from a chance to win a lottery, to a chance to find food for our hungry children. And that hope is more often then not disguised as a wish which in turn is more often then not clothed in a prayer or a meditation or a chant or in the blowing upon of an over ripe dandelion. When I blow on a dandelion I love to watch the twirling seeds flutter away, rising and falling on unseen currents, journeying off to places unknown. Those seed will find root again, to grow another chance for another human, or me, to make another wish. But even when there are no dandelions, I know I will find or use all the other ways we humans have to make wishes.
And some will be for me.
But today, I will use my wishes for you.