My granddaughter’s family moved from Montana to Nebraska a couple of weeks ago. She’s a photographer, so of course she posted a picture of the view from their front gate. A winter sunrise behind bare tree branches, their horses across the road, and in the foreground this sign. “And so, the adventure begins.” We should all meet this new year with a realization that we are beginning an adventure. Actually, each new day is a doorway to adventure.
It’s been said that an optimist is one who doesn’t have all the facts, and a pessimist is one who lives in reality. Each of us gets to determine how we approach the adventure. Too often, I waver between the choices. “What if?” sometimes looms large in my mind, and it usually concerns a possible disaster that hasn’t happened, and probably never will. I hate that I’m wired that way. Imagination can be either a blessing or curse.
No way to know what lies around the bend and, in truth, if we could know we’d probably crawl under the covers and never come out. And yet, we have all survived, conquered obstacles that we never imagined, and grown stronger for the struggles. Sarah Ban Breathnach says it’s not an adventure if there are no dragons.
Some of us have had our imaginations unhooked. Do you remember being a kid; the games you and your pals dreamed up that usually began with, “Pretend like…?” I wonder if kids today still do that. Our devices don’t encourage imagining. Sure, there are games that transport us to other realities, but those don’t exercise our imaginations, they simply chart a path for us to follow. Watching the news stimulates our imagination, but the subject matter is guided by whichever pundit is offering suggestions of possible disaster, and nefarious plots. We’re encouraged to concentrate on the dragons, not the angels that have our backs, or our own intuition and the evidence of how we have done battle and triumphed in the past.
Problem solving requires imagination and we have plenty of problems to solve, but fearful thinking keeps us mired down and muddies our ability to see the possibilities in the adventure. I hope you’ll become a kid again this year, and practice pretending that good lies ahead. If you have small children, play some “let’s pretend” with them. Let her imagine she is a princess, or that he is an astronaut off to explore the moon. Encourage them to tell you how that adventure might unfold.
I neglected to note the author of this quote but it seems like a good mantra for the times we live in and the year ahead.
“When you imagine, imagine the best that might be. What harm can it do?”