IMAGINE NATION
Saturday Sept. 9, 2017
Who are you?
Who am I?
Who is that, over there, who are they?
Imagination. Essential to creativity. To happy life. And, sadly, for those who suffer delusions – whether delusions of gandeur or detachment from reality. But who could imagine a happy life without a healthy appetite for imagination, for humour.
Right you are. Some people have neither.
So, I’ll talk about ‘everyone else’ …
You’ve seen those labels on products: AS SEEN ON TV
As if buying that cheap plastic gadget will make perfectly sliced veggies like … on TV. As if we’ll actually be thinner, happier or safer if we buy some product. Or, we’ll find love or success more easily if we just change our wardrobe, car, vacation destination or hair style …
I’m limited by my hair style. Having none, I advocate baldness and scalp massages as the new ‘in thing to do’.
But seriously, life is not depicted by TV, newspapers or online – just artifice creations of writers, marketers, corporations and governments, each motivated to convince us their way is the most attractive way, best way, most cost-effective way, future way …
But that’s not real, is it?
Life shows up where we look for it …
Shows up on faces.
Knock any door, walk any street, stroll any mall or corridor of work or play or power.
Study those faces.
In action, seeing these lives are real, not anything like our own or what we imagine or aspire toward – just real. Their real. Warts and all, left outside – weathered faces, like old leather – joys, pains, sufferings and struggles in furrowed brows, wrinkled roadmap-like faces.
And, that person coming the other way looking at you, what are they seeing?
Happy? Disillusioned, troubled, stressed? Seeing someone proud, or slumped? Someone clear in their self-image, what they do, where they are going? Maybe.
I think we notice people more – not based on where they are on rich-poor or power-powerless continuum, but rather based on how different they are from us. We, self – reference point we default to. We have a tendency to see people who are happier, wealthier and socially more important than we are as desirable. And I think we see people who are ‘less of something’ that we are as undesirable. We don’t view everyone, or anyone for that matter, objectively. We see them compared to ourselves. And we judge them. We judge them without knowing them at all based on no real evidence at all.
Are we comparing our life to what might have been?
Or seeing it as it really is?
Stepping back, seeing it as it could be?
Yes, we ‘can do’ almost anything we set our minds to. Everybody knows that cliché but do we try to live by it?
But what could we do, if we only had the guts – or if we just let go of the fear?
What could we accomplish if we shed our belief, that we can’t, exchanging it for belief that we can?
My rumination leaves me feeling clear – and I think it should be clear to all of us, we cannot possibly be someone else. All we can do, best we can do, is be a different ‘me’.
How different is a product of choice, chance and determination.
