Tag Archives: imagination

The many lives we don’t live

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After an argument with a loved one doesn’t end well, you re-live the argument with alternate endings.

After an angry exchange at a traffic light, you yell a profanity while sitting alone in your car. No one heard you, but you are now two lights away and still thinking about the incident. Replaying the anger, and the things you’d like to say to the other driver’s face, as if it mattered now as much as when the exchange actually happened.

After a witty exchange with a coworker, you think up other funny quips that you could have said. Nothing you will actually say later, just things that would have been great to say in the moment.

How many lives do we live in our minds, which never transpose to reality? Re-imagined scenarios, re-lived moments, re-invented futures. None of which will ever come to pass. Never lived in the real world… yet very real in our minds.

Unspoken expectations

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“Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.”  ~Chris Williamson

We spend so much time living in the past. We beat ourselves up for what we did do, didn’t do, should have done. We build scenarios that never happened yet are fully imagined. And we play these scenarios in our mind as if they are real. Then we are helpless not to respond through thoughts and perseverations, again as if the scenarios were real.

Unspoken expectations build resentment, steal joy, and limit our presence in the present… Not because we are living in the past, but because we are living in the imagined outcomes of possibilities which never existed.

The past, real or imagined, limits our ability to truly be present now, unless we let go and focus on our presence in the present. Unless we leave our unspoken expectations behind.

Novel worlds

I enjoy reading novels when summer comes along. I seek out books that take me to different worlds and different realms. I seek magic and the majestic. I don’t really enjoy historical fiction. I want dystopian tribulations, lost kingdoms, and kingdoms lost. Give me magical orbs, forbidden powers, fragile Gods, and alien encounters.

Set me free in a novel world, where I can escape on the pages, written or read, paper or digital, visual or auditory. Places I can visit in my mind; places that could never exist save for an author’s imagination.

Summer is a time to escape to places only the mind can go… thanks to a good book.

The silhouette

I was a passenger in a car driving on an overpass downtown, and I saw a silhouette of a person sitting at their computer in front of their window.

A writer of novels completing a best seller.

A manager looking at the day’s accomplishments.

A YouTube watcher waiting for Uber Eats to arrive.

A lonely person FaceTiming mom.

A work from home entrepreneur talking to a mentor or mentee.

A holiday planner booking their next flight.

A silhouette of a person on a computer, alone in a room. 1,000’s of possible stories, each one of them a momentary reality, and then the thought, the moment is gone. Just the silhouette remains.

Faces and stereotypes

I like to think that I don’t make snap judgments of people, but I do. Sometimes I see a face, or a haircut, or a mannerism, and I start to create a profile of the person’s life. Yesterday I overheard a conversation between a server and a very nerdy customer. Everything about his voice, dialogue, clothing, and even posture told me he was a geek.

That sounds mean. But here’s the thing, the profile I built for him was this:

He has a very small group of friends, but they are great friends that would go out of their way to help him. He loves board games, and prefers that they are cooperative rather than competitive. He isn’t involved in any organized sports but isn’t afraid to participate in sports with friends and comparatively he is as good as them and that’s good enough. He will go out of his way to interact with someone serving him and finds joy in those interactions. His sense of humour is as geeky as he is, and he isn’t afraid to laugh at his own jokes. He’s happy.

There are a lot of people who find it hard to be happy, I don’t think this guy has a problem being happy.

My judgement could be totally wrong. This guy might have been offended if he knew what I thought. He might lack confidence, or be quite unhappy. But I like my profiling.

On the other end of the spectrum, when I see someone grumpy or unhappy, I build back stories that give them reasons for this. I see them more as victims of circumstance rather than inherently angry or mean.

But in the end these are all fictions I create. I see faces and they tell me stories… not real stories but stories I create for them. Stereotypes are oversimplified, I tend to complicate them, individualize them, and create lives based on faces, looks, and mannerisms. I wonder what people see, when they see me?

Fictional assassins

I’m reading one of Mark Greaney’s Gray Man books, Sierra Six. It’s a spy novel with a rogue CIA agent fighting against evil terrorists. It brings to life how a handful of people can wreak havoc in the world.

It also makes me think about a few other things:

1. We like to support an underdog.

2. Vigilantes with a virtuous agenda make great underdogs.

3. Nefarious criminals have the upper hand in that most people don’t expect others to act in an evil way, and so bad scenarios are harder to defend against.

4. Assassins have amazing technology at their disposal, and I’m surprised more assassinations don’t happen.

On this last point, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to live a world where vigilantes and assassins take justice into their own hands, but I also don’t want criminals doing the same… and criminals doing this are far more likely than good people.

How long before we see a political figure being killed by a drone, or from a weapon more than a mile away? What kind of world would we live in where any political figure needs to constantly think about personal threats to themselves when out in public?

I know that books like this are about larger than life heroes, victims, and criminals, but the technology described in these books are usually real and/or possible. I know most people are smart enough to know that the vast majority of criminals get caught, and a life of crime doesn’t usually pay. But it only takes a few angry people to really disrupt the world we live in… and there are specific tragedies we can all think of that prove this.

Fictional assassins tend to have intelligence, physical strength, and top of the line high tech tools. Real assassins probably aren’t the full package that makes a storybook character, but they are probably getting access to similar weaponry. The threats they could pose are only getting worse. We shouldn’t need to live in fear, but we should never doubt the threat of people willing to do bad things for bad reasons. And maybe, just maybe, a vigilante do-good-er could come out of fictional imagination and into the real world to make the world a safer place.

Now back to my book!

Make believe

Halloween isn’t just for kids. Sure they get most of the candy and attention, but a lot of grown-ups wear costumes for work and for parties… and while some complain, many get right into it. Doesn’t matter if you’re a pirate, a ghoul, a celebrity, a superhero, or a favourite movie character, the makeup, costume, and accessories are donned with excitement, and even pride.

It’s not just a costume, it’s a chance to play make believe like when you were a kid. No, you aren’t fully immersing yourself in your character, but you are reminding yourself of that time in your life. You are getting a little piece of your childhood back.

And it’s fun (if you let it be fun). So if you didn’t have fun with it this year, that’s on you. Next year put a little more into it. Let yourself enjoy the youthful playfulness of dressing up. Play make believe for a night and escape back into your inner child for just a few hours. For a little extra fun, make your own costume rather than buying one. Add some creativity to your play.

Dream tax

I have a buddy who I occasionally buy lottery tickets with. This isn’t something I normally do, but when the grand prize is very high, we’ll each take turns buying some tickets. It’s fun to do, and over a year, it’s not a lot of money spent. I call lottery tickets a dream tax. The reason I call it this is because I have no expectations that buying the ticket will ever win me anything more than money to buy a few more tickets. However, the buying of a ticket does give me the opportunity to dream about what I’d do with the money.

In that way, the money spent on lottery tickets is a dream tax. It’s a payment made that allows me to imagine something I wouldn’t normally dream of. A small fee that opens the part of my brain that imagines what I’d do with millions of dollars. It’s fun to dream outrageously sometimes, and for that reason, I don’t mind paying the tax every now and then.