I’m a soccer fan and I rabidly follow soccer news from Japan, Europe and Brazil. The World Cup in South Africa is coming up next year, so there’s a lot of news about that.

The coach of the Japanese national team, Okada, has set the final four of the World Cup as Japan’s goal.  To be one of the last remaining four teams, when Japan has only won a couple of World Cup games in its history (and it was only when it hosted the World Cup on its home turf) seems not only ambitious, but more a folly.

But in a recent interview, he said something to the extent that the play style he’s implementing to the national team is the correct one for the Japanese, and that he can see his team reaching the Final Four.  He said “nothing will happen unless somebody starts seeing it, believing it.”

I really respect him for this statement.  For one thing, it takes supreme courage to make bold statements like that in Japan — where we consider our public statements much more seriously, we hold everyone accountable to a much higher standard than other countries I know of.  Being blasphemous, or at least not delivering on one’s promises, carry a very heavy price.  So Japanese tends not to say bold or strong things, afraid of being considered megalomaniac.

But it really takes Seeing of the Impossible or Unimaginable to make things happen in life.  None of the great inventions and innovations would have happened without that Mind Eye of imagination — the vision that something that has never happened can happen.  So many times we predict the future based on the past, thinking what happened before will happen again.  And that limits our view and slows down our progress.

Everything from world peace to cure to cancer to eradication of poverty — it has to be imagined first, and it has to be believed as possible, before it can happen.  We have to dare.

It seems silly to me, at least to the cynic inside, that I write about dreamy stuff like the last paragraph, when I struggle to make myself and those immediately around me happy everyday.  My tank has a big capacity but is filled so little that I have a hard time keeping myself running, let alone having enough to give out.

But I’m going to keep making small changes and taking little steps, and will make my contributions to World Peace and Heaven on Earth.  Turning struggles into thriving.  I see it.  I do see it.