by Catherine DeAngelis
“Only in quietness do we possess our own minds
and discover the resources of the Inner Life.”
Helen Keller
(To Love this Life)
As young as we are that time of our life unfolding when we first jot down words in our diaries that we keep hidden but are open secrets to parents, siblings and friends, Add the pencil sketches, clay sculptures or carpentry projects and that awkward case with the trombone we carry from school to home. Angst and joy from taking piano or ballet lessons and fear of face-off during the weekly play at ice-hockey games.
Childhood motivators are imprints on our minds meant to stand the test of time. A means of self-expression that get transmitted through us to give us the confidence to perform and facilitate what we occasionally catch a glimpse of, in the way we communicate and in the way we do work and play in our adult life today.
Some of us let these early to late teen years easily formulate our ease in self-expression. While for most of us we let those times stay dormant except for occasional friendly chats looking back when we say, wish I could do it all over again or wish I had done that – we think it’s too late now.
Learning to Speak Out Loud
Leap forward from a decade, two or more or so ago, to here and now. think how the thought of childhood motivators were the very backdrop of what gave us our own method of “speaking out loud” — when words didn’t cut it! And so we moved toward making job and career choices or overall life decisions sometimes asking ourselves how did we get here or why didn’t we give ourselves time to think about what it was we wanted back then.
At any age from where we left off the achievement we longed for and the aspiration we name now as a dream past — what if we were to nudge ourselves awake to that part within us and rewrite the script and found a way to do what we always wanted to do? What would we plot or renew that truly fired us up then?
We know who we are in present day from visiting days when we reflected upon what it was we wanted to do in life. Among our fathers, mothers or for many who didn’t get the support or encouragement – we had our teachers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, or muses who showed us something about ourselves that was unique and we could embellish it.
Past dreams, some might say, heck, who has time to dream. If we were to ask ourselves, albeit, stopping for a moment to say, where are my dreams, how am I visiting them or have I given up truly on ever reaching them?
Bottling Up or Opening Up Emotions
What is that song we strummed to on the guitar that brought us to a place of tenderness and understanding of seeing the world in a gentler light than what may have been our obstacles during those tumultuous or happy years of our youth.
In “Common Ways of Avoiding Emotions We Don’t Like” Helpguide.org explains how we are all born with a capacity to freely experience the full range of human emotions—including joy, anger, sadness, and fear. Yet many people are disconnected from some or all of their feelings. By trying to avoid pain and discomfort, their emotions have become distorted, displaced, and stifled. You lose touch with your emotions when you attempt to control them, rather than experience them.
Something happened to us and we question did we lose hold of who we are – our personality – our sense of understanding our emotions, in the deeper sense, anesthetized ourselves so that we would not feel the pain of coming of youth, adolescent and adulthood.
Dreams back then could have been a wild fancy a hope for something to work toward in future. We captured images in our minds and had ideas, emotions, and even felt sensations from the things we got excited about that brought us some gratification. It is unlike the experience of a dream in sleep or a daydream for that matter to conceive or imagine – it is more than passing time idly in a state of reverie.
Reinventing Ourselves
We can start using some imagination and creativity and learning to ask questions and retry something that wasn’t turning out to be reliable in the old way by discovering something in a new way. Remember to pull from our vast know-how skills, abilities and creative juices to get to a comfortable plateau. Once getting used to this place, launching off from what we’ve now learned sticks with us and reworking the formula – as we go along – we’ll find we are mastering the reinvention of us.
It takes patience to reinvent one’s self and that compassion we may give so easily to others is a personal must to give to ourselves during this time of transformation and transitioning to a new way of being. It’s okay to feel uneasy – and building e.g. safety networks, community or spirituality are only some things to think about adding to the list for keeping focused, optimistic and going strong.
Rewriting the Script – Using Tools Best for Us
What tools do you use to express yourself or to use your imagination – remembering possibilities are infinite?
- pen
- pencil
- paintbrush
- camera
- paint
- sketching
- music
- writing
- mathematics
- speaking
- dancing
- crafting
- building
- sewing
- cooking
- metal (all materials)
- Other ____________________
Which number related best to you?
Creativity and Imagination
We are surrounded by a world of creative people; finding our imagination to link that prospect of knowing ourselves and the genius waiting to be discovered or not is there for all of us. Our imagination is capable of conjuring a thought-provoking product coming from our own mind’s eye.
Imagination is our ability to form ideas or images in our mind and the ability of our mind to be creative and solve problems. This means then we all have imagination, we use it in our every day life.
Many words are associated with imagination, such as artistry, creativity, fancy, ingenuity, insight, inspiration, inventiveness, informal mind’s eye, originality, enterprise, resourcefulness, sensitivity, thought, and vision. Other related forms are image, imager, imagery, mental imagery, imaginable, imaginary, imaginative, imaginativeness, imagine, imaginings.
Dreaming Wakefully – Make it An Ideal Day!
Author and speaker, Barbara Sher in her book “Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want” gives us a reference point to easily move us through to weave dreaming catching into our lives. Sher refers to it “Your Ideal Day.”
Many people might think winning a lottery would be an ideal day, but Sher brings us to a different kind of personal reservoir. She takes us through the hours of our day and gets us to imagine what, where and who to keep in mind while we think about what a fantasy day would be like for us. Try Sher’s lessons and create an ideal day.
EXERCISE 9: Your Ideal Day
With pen in hand and as much paper as you need (or a tape recorder if you prefer to dream out loud), take a leisurely walk through a day that would be perfect if it represented your usual days—not a vacation day, not a compromise day, but the very substance of your life as you’d love it to be. Live through that day in the present tense and in detail, from getting up in the morning to going to sleep at night. What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? What do you have for breakfast? Do you make it yourself—or is it brought to you in bed, with a single rose and the morning paper? Do you take a long, hot bath? a bracing cold shower? What kinds of clothes do you put on?
How do you spend the morning? The afternoon? At each time of day, are you indoors or outdoors, quiet or active, alone or with people?
As you go through the hours of your fantasy day, there are three helpful categories to keep in mind: what, where, and who.
What are you doing—what kind of work, what kind of play? Imagine yourself at the full stretch of your capacities. If you’d like to sing or sail, and you don’t know how, in this fantasy you do know how.
Where—in what kind of place, space, situation? A London flat, an Oregon farm, a fully equipped workshop, an elegant hotel room, a houseboat?
Who do you work with, eat with, laugh and talk with, sleep with? You will undoubtedly want to write some of your favorite real people into your fantasy; you might also want to include some types of people you’d like to be surrounded by—writers, musicians, children, people your own age, people of all different ages, athletes, Frenchmen, financiers, simple country people, celebrities.
What about you? How do you envision your ideal day? How close are you to achieving it? What is one thing you can do today to get you closer to your ideal life?
For the Sake of Our Health
For most of us, our body is fitted with five amazing senses. They work together to help us make sense of the world around us. As truly amazing as these are, we also have our emotions and how we respond to things. Awareness is key in all things we care about as human beings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Imagination is not a talent of some people, but is the health of every person.” Find time during a lunch break, a Sunday afternoon. Take a brisk walk to a coffee shop nearby, bring along a sketchbook, a journal, a camera. Perhaps you can spend an evening or two, a simple assigned 20 minutes to give yourself some dream catching mind space. There is no cost! The value this gives us is immeasurable. We find our imagination and creativity are limitless.
Of all the various components we can describe think how this maintains a healthy mental and emotional state and personal awareness – giving ourselves permission to rewrite or reinvent our life’s script . Taking a few quiet moments to dream is vital as it is to waking and sleeping or eating and drinking each day we are alive.
