"We are blind
to the worlds within us
Waiting to be born"
- Swedish poet and philosopher Tomas Lindberg (also the vocalist for death metal band At the Gates)
This may come as a shock to many of you, but I was never very good at maths.
I took up more time of my maths classes wondering why in British English we pluralise "maths" but not "tax" while in American English they do the opposite. I should probably look that up.
I never saw the point in mathematics as a subject. "We already know the answer to this," I said to my good friend and tutor Shai (RIP 1986-2017). "It's in the back of the book." He smiled and said, "The answer is always there, but it's important we discover it." Mathematics is sort of like time, insofar that a clock isn't "keeping" or "measuring" time but giving us a practical representation of it for our consumption. Numbers, algebra, calculus, etc. is the same. It's giving our brains an opportunity to discover the answer. Because the answer is "always" there.
Not so with the humanities.
When I was in high school, my now favourite book series The Expanse by James S. A. Corey did not exist. At all. There was no process of "finding the answer" to The Expanse and all my imagining or trying to (in maths class most likely) would not produce the same result. It is as individual to the authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham as the mole on my head is to me. However it strikes me that the humanities and the sciences is bound by one tether, and that is discovery.
As Lindberg says (before screaming the house down), there are entire worlds within us waiting to be born. This could be the world of Star Trek by Gene Roddenberry, the world of Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling, the world of portable digital music by Steve Jobs and his iPod; there are entire alternate realities in our heads that we can project out into the world and make real.
When it comes to almost anything in life, nothing is "real" unless we "discover" it first. When businesses approach me to write their copy, I am giving others an opportunity to make their world real to other people. It sounds a bit grandiose, but the process of using words as a vehicle to help one's discovery is the way our value becomes "real" to the world at large.
Building something and hoping people will come is not discovery. Telling and sharing the world within us with others makes discovery happen.