Imagination

Do you remember from your adolescence or early adulthood how difficult it was to imagine being... OLD? We couldn't picture it, or at least I couldn't. I recall that at 19 I tried to imagine myself as an old person, but I ran into a blockage: I couldn't seem to picture myself much beyond my early 30s. Naturally, I thought that my inability to imagine myself in the future meant that I had no future, as if not being able to imagine was somehow (magically) an ability to predict the future.

In fact, my later life has been completely different than I imagined, or even could imagine. Here I am, an old person, and I completely and consistently failed to imagine how it might be to be this particular old person. Just when you think life has no surprises for you (or at least no good ones), it turns you in a direction you could not possibly have foreseen. And that means that as (if) I get older, my imagination will not now reach all the way to that me that then will be (if I make it that far) when I am 80 or 90.

I hear younger people going through a version of this frequently. I heard a young (30s) woman say that she saw no point in "going on", as she couldn't imagine living in the future without whatever it was she thought she had to have, like her husband or coffee-pot or whatever. What could life possibly have to offer me? she said. I can't imagine going on without [whatever], she said. So what's the point? she said. It's as if she were saying to the Universe that if she couldn't have what she now wanted, she would just resign. She couldn't imagine a different life, so she didn't believe she could have one.

It's hard to think of a kind response to this kind of shortsightedness. I don't mean to trivialize her pain, but her failure to imagine was only part of the problem. The future is not only difficult to imagine, it is impossible to imagine. Which of us could have imagined 25 years ago that we would be living as we do now? That our lives would be as changed as they have been? And how could we have imagined it? People have gone through unimaginable changes and made a wholly different life for themselves. I wonder how many people have lived through tragedy and unimaginable loss and suffering, and who later made gold from the straw of their lives? Not only have they conquered the bad changes and transmuted them, they have made total changes in direction and concept and made them work too.

The next question for us to consider is this: Why should we think we have to imagine something good to be able to look forward to life? When our imagination fails us, as it must inevitably, why should we think that this gives us no further goals? What do we need goals for, anyway?

I can now imagine that my life 20 years from now, assuming I make it that far, will be entirely different from anything I CAN imagine. I don't need to imagine it, in fact, I just have to keep living it one step at a time, and I can certainly imagine that some of those steps will be difficult ones. But some of them will be wonderful. Perhaps it's our task to take the things that happen for good or for ill and to create something better for ourselves from them.