One Apple A Day #784 - Imagination
Who we are today, our present, is informed by both our past stories and our future stories. The first being told by my memories, the last being created by my imagination.
Unfortunately, we tend to overvalue our past story and to undervalue our future one. An attitude that makes us perceive our present more as a point of arrival than a starting point.
This is what psychologist Dan Gilbert calls the "end of history illusion".
It's somehow understandable.
For our self-preservation brain, trained over hundreds of thousands of years, the ability to predict the immediate future is vital. That means favouring answers more than questions, and we can only connect the dots looking backwards. But that would make us no different from any other living beings in the world.
What set human beings apart is the ability to imagine. To see what doesn't exist and create it.
It takes courage because imagination sparks more questions than answers. But it also allows us to grow, learn and invent ourselves and our world.
When we are trapped in the self-preservation attitude, our present self is mostly informed by our past. We keep repeating ourselves.
When we step into self-realization, we unlock the power of imagination and the choices and actions of our present self are driven but who we can and want to be.
"[...]imagination. It's the most extraordinary set of powers that we take for granted: the ability to bring into mind the things that aren't present. It's why we are so different from the rest of life on earth. That's why we're sitting in a beautiful building, drinking from these cups. Because human beings make things. We create things. We don't live in the world directly; we live in a world of ideas and of concepts and theories and ideologies."
Sir Ken Robinson (source)