imagination, inside and out

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.

Alan Alda

    

     Most of what I've been composing for this blog has not been deliberate. Which is to say, I have not set out to write a particular poem or story, or present some other people's thoughts that interest me at any time. I've been writing and presenting material that interests me, intrigues me, captures my imagination at the time that it happens, when it happens. But I think that what I create happens to me much more than I happen to them. They come when I allow myself to simply release myself to my imagination.        
     A graphic example just came to mind: I'm sitting doing something, anything - reading the paper while having a coffee for instance - when a thought comes to me. It's as if I notice a movement, and I look up from the paper and see a white rabbit (yes, like Alice in Wonderland) which hurries past me, pauses, looks back, then turns and moves on; and of course I'm curious, and I drop the paper and follow, and eventually, I'm no longer following the rabbit. But I'm still exploring. Even though the rabbit - a random, unexpected thought - has ceased to be the lure, I'm still exploring; most often without any direct purpose or expectation of discovery; simply letting it happen; my mind without reins. I think I feel most myself when I'm in this place. You can think of it as daydreaming, if you like, but for me it's when I'm unaware that I'm actually imagining. It's when I'm simply following along for a while behind whatever movie is going on in my mind and then only afterwards realizing that I was leading my own journey. In between, I was just living, and in a rich, vibrant, exciting world.     
     I think that this is actually the normal human state; the ability to both imagine what is not actually there and to pursue it. I think that all humans are imaginative and creative. We all daydream. We are all artists. We all chase after rabbits. It is the thing that sets us apart from the other creatures with which we share this planet. Think for a minute about all that has come from imagination; the things that never existed until someone imagined them. The music, the paintings, the literature, the dance, the architecture, the sculpture, even the technology I'm using right now. I marvel at it all.
     I think we live in what I see as two realities: an inner reality and an outer reality. The inner reality is as I have outlined so far. The outer reality is more humdrum. It's the reality of attending to necessary practicalities; essentially our need to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves. For most of the time we live in this outer reality. It takes up most of our time and most of our imagination. We wake up into this outer reality every day and we tend to stay in it because our minds have been conditioned to do so.
     What I mean is that it's easier for us to access thinking dedicated to dealing with this outer reality than the thoughts that exist in the inner reality because it's become the priority of our lives. In fact, inner reality thinking is frequently discouraged; deemed unproductive. How many times have you been scolded by someone for daydreaming when there's more important things to do? But, what's more important?
      When you think of some of the products of thinking mainly in the outer reality - wars, weapons, pollution, corporations, dogmas to name but a few - and compare them to the products of the inner reality - art - I wonder if there should not be more balance to these two realities; or even an inversion of them wherein we'd all tend to naturally wake up thinking as we do in the inner reality; where it would be as difficult for the average person to access the outer reality state of mind as it is for them to access the inner reality state of mind.  
     If this were the case I think we'd all wake up knowing that these were our own ideas, and we'd feel free to follow them, and I think we'd all know ourselves and each other better, and we'd appreciate just how unique each of us are, and we'd treat each other better.
     It's an ongoing struggle for me, shepherding myself into living in my inner reality away from living in my outer reality. But the rabbits keep coming, and I'm quicker to chase.