High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘Imagination’

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The pumpkins are ripe; it’s playtime.  Quick! Get your giddiness on!

Fall into life’s arms laughing. With all this bright gladness about, what else is there to do?

Play is the child of wisdom, you know, the melody of the Yes.  It’s the best teacher and the highest art all rolled into one ball of wax.

Put your cares on the shelf and whisk yourself to the world where imagination reigns.  Pull your dreams from your attic’s trunks and wear them, dancing, in the sun.

Skip down the sidewalks; whistle in the streets.

Live from the place where every pretend is possible and all possibilities are but a wisp of thought away.

Ever since I was a young child, on the 22nd of May I have picked a bouquet of wildflowers in honor of my mother’s birthday.

She’s been gone for a couple decades now, although her loving spirit is as tangible for me as ever.

The month of May was “our” month, holding both my birthday at its beginning and hers at its end, and Mother’s Day in the middle.  Not only that, but May was her middle name.

She was a woman of great compassion and bravery, a teacher of nurses, a healer of wounds.  She had a great sense of fun, a wonderful imagination, a beautiful laugh.

She loved birds and flowers and knew the names of hundreds of them.  She loved classical music, big bands, and the songs of Jerome Kern and Rogers and Hammerstein.

She read me poetry and fairy tales and took me to concerts and circuses.

We built sand castles together and combed the shores of the Great Lakes for beautiful rocks.  We camped out and traveled to the wilderness and to the ocean and to great cities.

She gave me the best of everything she knew, and I adored her.

And so, on May 22nd every year, I pick a little bouquet of wildflowers in honor of her birthday and let them carry me back through the years I was privileged to share with her and to bask in our love.

The water drops were starting to get bored, just laying there on these stones, melting and freezing, melting and freezing, over and over again.  “I wish the weather would make up its mind,” one of them groused.

The others might have joined in the chorus, except for the wave of laughter that suddenly welled up from the adjoining puddle.

“Hey!” one of the drops from the first puddle shouted, “What’s going on over there?”

His question was nearly drowned out by more shrieks of laughter.  But then a drop from the second puddle slid near the edge and chortled, “We’re making cartoons!”

Catching his breath, he told them that his fellow drops had discovered that the ones who weren’t totally frozen on the surface could move around a little, and if they piled up in little layers, they could make shapes.

Now the whole gang was caught up in the game, he said. They had turned their whole puddle into a sketch pad and they were taking turns guessing what each other’s doodles were.  It was a hoot!

Pretty soon the drops in the first puddle were piling themselves up in squiggles and laughing uproariously themselves.  Mix a little wiggle with some imagination, and you can whip up a batch of fun just about anywhere.

We see such a narrow band of things, a little slice of rays from a giant spectrum of light.  It’s hard to know what’s real and true.  All we’ve got, when it comes right down to it, are our made-up assumptions.

I mean, you talk with the quantum physics guys for awhile, and you end up not knowing whether anything is even really there.  Not even time and space.

Maybe we’re all just one big, multi-layered dream that some giant in another dimension is dreaming.  Who knows?  (And what happens if he wakes up?)

Maybe we, together, are the giant who is dreaming us.  Maybe we’re the dreamer and the dream.

All we have to go on is what happens in our hearts and heads, and whatever it is that we ourselves come to believe in and imagine.  Somehow, it seems, that affects the way the whole of it works out for us, individually and together.

The world that I inhabit was beautiful today, and my heart was glad and loving it, whatever it is.  That’s the piece that I’ll add to the ever changing puzzle.  You?

“Make believe.”   Check out its definition at dictionary.com and you’ll see that when you use it as a noun, it means “pretense, especially of an innocent or playful kind; feigning; sham.” And when you use it as an adjective, it means “pretended; feigned; imaginary; made-up; unreal.”

Well, that’s pretty much what I learned growing up.  Imagination, the capacity to make believe, is a function designed for our amusement, a kind of built-in toy.  It is great fun to imagine.

Yet if you read about the word “make,” the definitions say:

“to bring into existence by shaping or changing material;” and “to produce; cause to exist or happen; bring about.”

(Hmmmm.  Sounds like some kind of alchemy to me.  I think we have a clue here.)

Leaping over to “believe,” we find “to have confidence in the truth, the existence, or the reliability of something, although without absolute proof that one is right in doing so.”

So if you’re doing make believe, you’re causing something to exist or happen and you have confidence in the truth and reality of it.   And what was it that Napoleon Hill said?  “What your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”  That’s some pretty heady stuff!

I say grab your big shiny “What If” hook and go fishing in the Cosmic Soup of Possibilities.  There’s no telling what you might find.  Imagine!

Remember the Land of Let’s Pretend that you visited as a child?  All you had to do was turn to your imagination and it would whisk you away to any world at all.

You could be a rock star, a cowboy, a princess, a lion.  You could fly through space or gallop across the desert on the bare back of your mighty steed. The stories were endless and oh so very real.  And your friends would be there with you, playing right along.

What if you visited Let’s Pretend again?  What if you dreamed a magical tomorrow, set a couple, three years in the future?  What if you painted it with all your fondest dreams and saw them in three dimensions, in living color with a state-of-the-art soundtrack to boot?

Imagine!  You had put all your best talents to work, had played your hardest at keeping your goals in mind.  Opportunities, resources, ideas and connections had materialized like magic, as if invisible hands were guiding you on your way.

And now, there you were, in just the place you wanted to be, confident and serene, doing the things you most wanted to do, surrounded by people who made your heart sing.  What would it look like?  How would it feel?  Can you see it?  Can you imagine?  Do you have the audacity to dream such a dream?

“Limitations live only in our minds,” pro cyclist Jamie Paolinetti said.  “But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless.”

Want some limitless possibilities of your own for the new year?  Crank up your imagination and see where it leads.  Ask yourself, “What would make me feel really alive?  What would be a real hoot to do?” and go for it.

Imagination is where it all starts, you know.  Everything.  It’s the great keeper of all dreams, where everything is possible.  And all you need to unlock its powers is a willingness to suspend your can’ts.   If you want to enter imagination’s world, you need to leave all your why-nots at the door.  Forget your lack of capital and training.  Forget your age.  Forget your past.  Forget every excuse you ever used to keep you from flying free.

Oh, and drop your seriousness in the bucket at the gate, too.  This is a world for your child-mind.  It’s a game of let’s pretend.  Pretend you’re lying on the grass on a warm and sunny afternoon, watching big whipped-cream clouds drift across the sky.  Pretend you have no schedule, no appointments, no pressing responsibilities, no obligations of any kind.  You’re just lying there, wholly relaxed and free, without a care in the world, wondering what you could do that would make you feel really alive, really pumped about your life.

And as you watch the clouds, they start to take on shapes.  You could be a lion-tamer, a rock star, an archeologist digging for dinosaur bones.  You could marry the mate of your dreams, travel the world, get a job painting Easter eggs.  You could own the company you work for or start one of your own.  You could form a barbershop quartet, or learn to play the harmonica.

Something inside you knows your best dreams.  Even if you have pushed them down every single time they tried to surface.  They’re in there.  And lying on your back, so relaxed and warm, you can let them float up and take shape in your imagination’s sky.

And then you can ask, “Why not?” and “What if?”  And when you exit Imagination’s world, if you forget to pick up all the stuff you dropped in the bucket at the door, you just might come away with a whole new direction for your life.