I was sitting in the dining room at the arboretum this morning looking out over the lake. It’s a sunny, brisk (insert the word “cold”) day and there were geese walking single file across the ice. They looked like they were tippy-toeing across the lake. It was actually pretty funny. I wanted to get a picture of their walk, but they were too far away to see them clearly.
Maybe the key is imagination – imagining what they looked like. This fall I saw a duck standing on the shore of a creek. She would lift one leg, to stand one-legged and after about 15 seconds she would fall over. She did it at least four more times while I was standing there watching her.
Two “aha’s” came to me as I thought about the duck – first, you can imagine in your mind what that looked like and I hope get a chuckle from it. And, second, maybe she was practicing how to stand on one leg. Her perseverance is a lesson for us humans. How many times do we give up after only one or two tries when things don’t turn out as we had hoped?
Now, back to imagination – I had a conversation with a friend last week about a series of books we have been reading for years. The first book in the series is about to be released as a feature film and we both had the same reaction. We independently watched a trailer of the movie and came to the conclusion that we like how we imagined the characters to look and act in our minds better than the cast they had chosen. When the movie is released we are going to have a glass of wine and talk about “our” characters – letting our minds create the scenes.
I guess the whole point of this is that our minds are a rich and fertile place to imagine and create visions for ourselves. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but our imagination, as they say, is priceless. What things do you let yourself imagine? Do you let yourself have flights of fancy as you explore new ideas? What new things have you discovered when you let your mind soar?
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