The loss of imagination

There’s been a lot of talk about the future in school (we are currently doing a module called digital technology and have a future-based brief). We’ve been given tools to predict it, to imagine it and to, to some extent, create it. There’s processes and methods being tossed around.

But the most important thing about creating the future, or even trying to predict it, is something we haven’t even touched upon.

And that is imagination. Because if we can’t even imagine or even dream about something, how can we then try to realize it?

The future exists first in the imagination, then in the will, then in reality.
- Barbara Marx Hubbard

What if that imagination and dreaming is partly destroyed in us already? By teachers telling us to stop daydreaming in class. By society telling us that there’s no use in dreaming, because what we dream will never come true. By parents not listening to us when we were young.

If we’re partly damaged imagination-wise, how might we be able to think of a future that isn’t based on 2015-assumptions? Because that comes with a lot of preconceptions of what is possible and therefore creates a future that might not be as good as it could be.

How might we discover and use our imagination again, so we can create a better future?

This is still something I’m trying to figure out. It’s hard to reignite parts of yourself that you’ve tried to blow out for years and years. And with the constant knocking from social media on your shoulder it’s even harder now to get some time to daydream and let your brain start the imagining process.

One step for me is to start meditating, set off some offline-time in my calendar and allow myself to be bored. Hopefully, that will spark my imagination.