Imagine
Imagination
Ruminations
Toward an
Imagination Nation
Posted on July 17, 2011
Before something is created,
before anything is realized, it must be imagined. Imagination is where
the act of creation takes place. After that it’s handling the details.
The “Aha!” moment is magical,
but it doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. It happens within a story. It
happens in language. It happens (and is constrained by) what we know,
what we believe, what we interpret, what we feel, what we want, what we
need, what we know, and maybe most importantly what we allow to be
possible. Think about it. Any skilled craftsman in Ancient Egypt or
Greece could have built a phonograph or an airplane. It was not a
matter of skill but of imagination. It didn’t exist in the stories they
believed and lived in and so it never occurred to them to put things
together in such a way as to build these things.
New ideas always start out as a
story to be told and need to be nurtured to grow. Being able to express
that story is the first step. There are many ways that can happen and
every time and way it is expressed it changes a little opening ever new
possibilities to explore. Each time it is told and each person it is
shared with adds something and at some point it grows from possibility
to probability and the story shifts from “Can it be?” to “How do we?”
It has grown into a project.
It is in the Project phase that
the story takes on a physical reality. Like the crab that builds its
house on its back, we start attaching bits and pieces of things that we
have and know how to do to the story until it reaches a point that
anyone can see it and say “Yes, that’s what that is!”
There are many tools and
techniques that can be used every step of the way. After all, people
have been doing this for many thousands of years and some have taken
the time and effort to look at how and why and what goes on and
imagined and created many tools to help. I hope that in this enterprise
we can bring these to bear on those things that will make a difference
for all of us, as in the dialog between David Bowman and HAL9000 near
the end of 2010:
“HAL9000: What is going to happen?
Dave: Something wonderful.”
–Ivars
If you want to respond to this article, you can write me at: ivars@eastjesus.net