DIGGING DEEPER #2: IMAGINATION
There's little hope for our future unless we use our imagination - and a lot of it.
When I speak of imagination, I speak of the explorer’s and creator’s kind of imagination which can take something existing and use it as a starting point to imagine something new or something extended.
Often this kind of imagination will take a number of existing objects, questions, ideas, and rearrange them to create something new.
Take for example the lunch tree in book 3, shaping (easy town books).
In book 1, beginning, the town project team talks about letting nature inspire their designs for the town, in particular with regard to avoiding endless repetitions, straight lines and soullessness.
In book 2, travelling, one of the characters asks whether the team shouldn’t rethink the way they work, in particular with regard to sitting stiffly in offices, at conference tables, at lunch tables.
For book 3, shaping, the same character invented the lunch tree which is a combination of the first two thoughts with a pinch of humour, doing the unexpected, and thinking yet again of the Lord of the Rings (Lothlorian, of course).
Why is this kind of imagination important?
The explorer’s and creator’s imagination is crucial if we want to progress, evolve, and solve the crises on our planet. If we only think about the things that already exist, then we will rarely make new discoveries and very likely, we will fail to create a world where people and nature can thrive.
Why do I keep saying that corporations, politicians, journalists and quite a few other people lack imagination?
Because most of them hold on to what they know, read or learned about, and in the worst case, they hold on to believes.
How to activate and use the explorer’s and creator’s imagination?
That will be different for different people, I guess. I also guess that a crucial step is to give yourself the freedom to think freely, the freedom to take your mind to a lake, get into a kayak and when you’re in the middle of the lake rise from the kayak to do some somersaults in the air and then dive into the water with a great splash.
The brain is an incredible instrument, but it needs incentives to open new thinking roads. Using our imagination to fly is a way to tell our brain: Hey, you don’t have to be afraid. Let’s go on a dance. Let’s see what happens when everything is possible. We might discover something.
Why is it so important that we use our imagination to create our future?
Because change starts in the mind. So long as we only see what is, there will be ever less hope. When we use our imagination, we can create lunch trees, or visions for cities that are great to live in, or visions for a global effort to stop the nonsense we accumulated over the past centuries and rethink life on our planet and restore the natural world and our communities — together. It needs imagination to create those visions.
RUHA BENJAMIN, IMAGINATION
Originally, I wanted to introduce Ruha Benjamin’s very recommendable book Imagination, as first guest entry for Digging Deeper. I still hope that I will at some point take the time for a dig or two, but since I’m way behind schedule, I’ll just add this recommendation.
About 90% of Ruha Benjamin's book was a happy dance for me, with some angry curses and grim frowns, but nonetheless happy because so much in this book not only relates to my work but extends it in ways I couldn’t, especially as relates to race and tech.
And that’s one of the big points for this digging deeper project. It’s about finding each other, putting our minds together, exploring, digging, and extending each other’s work.
I would love a chat with Ruha Benjamin about whether it is possible to teach imagination. Or maybe all it will take is to find a way to free imagination.
To add just one quote of the many possible.
'And if we believe that revolutions are possible, then we have to be able to imagine different modes of being, different ways of existing in society, different social relations.' (Ruha Benjamin, Imagination)
DIGGING SIDEWAYS
And here a sideways dig: Using our imagination might work as antidote to populism and the right. Why? Because both feed of limited and limiting ideas. A free mind, an explorer’s mind, a creator’s mind will not be caged.
