Taking the White Queen’s lead, I try to do my imaginings before breakfast, so I can spend the rest of my day focusing on the positive things in life. A little bit each day is a way to focus life on really important matters. Reflecting on death is an important spiritual practice in many different traditions. Contemplating one’s own death, or the death of billions, feels impossible, even though it is a certainty from the day of our birth. “Why sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.� It is not bad to think of impossibly dark possibilities. “When I was younger I always did it for a half an hour a day,� the Queen tells Alice. Like the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, I find it useful to imagine these “impossibilities� a little bit each day. The catastrophe would directly and indirectly involve a massive die-off of human populations. In any of these scenarios, we would anticipate an economic and environmental collapse, though not necessarily in that order. It could be a sleeper computer virus, wiping out all digital memory banks. It could be a global nuclear war, a devastating pandemic, or perhaps rapid climate change.
