Imagining, one might think, requires stepping away from what “is” (being beyond or outside of what “is”) to consider what is not – to consider what could be.
Indeed, on the surface of it, the ability to imagine in ways that can alter what “is” appears sometimes to be a rare gift – something that manifests in very few individuals. Something that requires some form of stepping away from the constraints that day-to-day reality place on most. The very few who can see other possibilities that have yet to be created and, with such vision, create them.
Perhaps that is all true – on occasion.
But, looking beyond the surface, at the broader pattern of transformative imagining. Most of the time those who deploy imagination to great effect, don’t really do so by moving around or outside of the realities that surround them. Rather they move further into those realities (be it the current world of astrophysics and its sense of what “is”, or a society’s approach to foster youth services, or how higher education thinks and works, or the interplay between values and political choices or …).
They move closer. Close enough to see more clearly to the dance of the details (and what a surprising and imagination-provoking experience that can be). Close enough to see the patterns of thinking (and doing) that we have come to understand as tangible constraints (fences around the possible). Constraints that emerge from a collective weaving together of ideas, assumptions, and metaphors on which narratives (the stories we tell about and are told by the world we inhabit) – narratives that lock in what “is” in ways that become so familiar they seem to be a part of an unchangeable “given”.
Close enough to come to a different understanding of what “is” in granular detail. And it is at that level of understanding that imagination takes hold and, at its best, redefines the whole – creates a very different sense of what is possible that redefines fundamentally what “is”.
The journey that takes those with the need to know and understand from the outside to the internal core of the realities around them is a journey best undertaken by those who are willing to take the risk involved in questioning – potentially destabilizing – forms and foundations. Messing about with what so solidly “is” – what is “given” – in ways that open the way to imaging how those solid things can be altered, rearranged, redirected (reimaged) to create a path that shifts what we can see and, in turn, how we think, and what we then could do (because what is possible has changed and that has taken the imaginative one and those many with who they share their vision to … everywhere).
The ability of imagination to change reality and expand the possible is both a remarkable puzzle (unexplainable in the end, why a given individual’s imagination can see possibilities others cannot – unexplainable to why some choose to accept what “is” and others are always questioning – tinkering with current reality) and, at the same time. somehow something we know well – as well as we know the regular urge to raise questions like “what if” and “why not”.
As we move into the new year, it seems we might benefit from having a lot more people for whom the quest for really knowing allows for a deep level of understanding that then engages imagination in ways that lead to possible, purposeful, and positive change.
Be that in how, for example, higher education rethinks how its exceptional capacities serve a changing world in changing ways (perhaps one small change at a time) or how we come to really reimagine how we might better live as positive forces for life on a complex and amazing sphere in a vast and currently pretty much unknown universe or why we have come to so often think that efficiency and effectiveness can exist without kindness and care at their core … one does wonder.
Anyway, wishing you an overabundance of questions in 2024 (and beyond),
The picture on the front of this card shows the cousin of the writer of this card on an arborist specimen gathering trip to remote areas of China in 1981. He traveled widely in the service of trees, their propagation, and preservation and crossed many bridges to unfamiliar places (that he came to know and treasure) repeatedly throughout his life.