This is the paradox of transformative experience: Because our imagination is bounded by our existing templates of how the world as we know it works, we fail to anticipate the greatest transformations—the events and encounters so unmoored from the familiar that they transfigure our map of reality and propel us into a wholly novel mode of being. This is as true of civilizations—the ancient Greeks could never have fathomed the miraculous cascade of inventions that let me read Plato on a digital tablet via wireless Internet aboard an airplane—as it is of our individual imaginations.
