Imagination

In my eighth decade of life, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the object pictured above is a large piece of driftwood that found its new home on the Oregon beach. Does that interest you? Excite you? Make you want to run away? Consider this: If, instead of 82, I was 8 years- old, I could tell you with reasonable certainty that the object pictured above is a giant beach monster…a sand-eating, people-chasing, bow-legged monster. And I would advise you to get out of its way.

Something happens between 8 and 82. We grow up, yes. We mature in our thinking processes, yes. And we lose far too much of our capacities to imagine. Without doubt. “What if…” is the language of imagination. You and I will never regain the quality of our 8-year-old imaginations, but we can look around us and see what the world would be like if nations didn’t war against nations. If everyone had enough eat and a safe place to sleep. If justice and honesty drove our economic and/or political systems. What if… Change in this old world can come at the end of a sword or as the result of power, but “what if” we imagined our way into justice. That is soul work, spirit work, and it takes courage to move into this child-like, sacred way of relating to reality. Imagining has to be turned into acting, to doing. But it takes folks like you to strike the match. What if you imagined 5 new things before dinner tonight, five new things that would make the world right around you a better, safer, smarter place. You can’t change the world with one “what if…” but maybe you could begin to influence change in your little patch of life.

So, say after me…”What if….” You take it from there.