Imagine your way out of it

I’m an imagineer from way back. Never felt bored. Not if I had a pen in my hand or a window through which to gaze into a whole other universe. I could imagine myself anywhere, could imagine my friends into the room with me, could invent new friends or design theatrical concepts or draw gardens busting from the corner of my maths page, ivy climbing the margins, children hanging upside down from the graph paper lines, their knees muddy from days in the outdoors.

It is for this reason that I find myself annoyed to discover, as an adult, that we are taught to devalue our imaginations. We must remember things, instead. We must know things. We must agree or disagree with things. Amongst all this serious business, where, now, is that easy access I once had to escape from monotony and distress via the imagination?

Public Service Announcement: your imagination can set you free.

You know what I blame? Mindfulness. This is what adults are told to do when they’re faced with something that absorbs them so completely that they can think of little else. Breathe in, we’re told. Be mindful of your breath. Imagine it as a certain colour, we’re told, or a certain shape. Breathe out, we’re advised. Feel the breath leave your body. Be mindful of the moment. Occupy the moment and cast from your mind the future and also the past.

The trouble with this is that the future is descending upon us and the past pursues us like a bear. So mindfulness is an attempt to replace the compelling with the benign. Focus, we are told, on the nothingness that exists all around and throughout us constantly, rather than the visceral, the panic-inducing, the emotional, and the galling.

But our imagination is so much more powerful than that! Which is so great! Except when it’s terrible! Because sometimes what happens when you’re an adult being pursued by a metaphorical bear is that your imagination deploys itself like an airbag and there you are, imagining all of the worst-case scenarios. Instead of removing you from reality entirely and skipping ahead swinging a basket of berries through a cool, mossy forest, there’s your imagination, right in the middle of reality, isolating the absolute worst bits and then setting them on fire.

Creativity is the opposite of anxiety, though. If we’re building something, we’re solving that problem, rather than whatever lame unresolved adult worry has decided to  make itself today’s headline.

So may I humbly suggest, for those of us who find ourselves stuck, frozen, overloaded and overwhelmed and not the least bit inclined to be mindful, and especially not to breathe for heaven’s sake… that we deploy our imaginations instead. Colouring in requires imagination. Not much. Not enough to require any thinking. But if you start colouring in and set yourself a task to colour every letter o in the entire paragraph, you’ll realise fairly swiftly that your brain is imagining things. It’s matching bits of the colouring to other bits. It’s making rules about consistency and colour shading and contrast. Before long you’ll have decided to do the colouring in a sliding scale of shading, or to use a red pencil as well as an HB. It’s rewarding, this part of your brain being occupied like this, and it’s not much at all.

So imagine what it would be like to devote an hour in your day to writing something. Write a letter to a kid you felt sorry for in primary school. Write the story of two people meeting for the first time who don’t know yet that they’re going to change each other’s lives. Write a poem and post it in a letterbox.

If you’re a reader you use your imagination all the time. If you listen to things like music or radio plays or audiobooks, you’re a pro.

Daydreaming is what mindfulness wishes it was. Sit and have a cup of tea and imagine yourself into something nice. Doesn’t have to be next week. Just once upon a made-up-day in the future. Imagine yourself thanking your favourite person at your very own opening of an exhibition of those little paintings you’ve done a few of but wouldn’t like to tell anybody you sort of like the idea of one day exhibiting.

I recently worked with some kids on a creative project and I was astonished at the potency of their imaginations. Our imagineering muscles need a workout, grown-ups. Otherwise we get stuck. Look out a window. Draw in the margins. Colour in the zeroes.