Imagination

Over the last week or so, I've had hints of something - like an invisible muse teasing me. But it wasn't invisible. It was the photograph of the man looking for glass and metal at the side of the road. It was the bedridden man I just visited. It was the deluge of social media around me. It was staring me in the face even as I looked myself in the mirror.

It was only after speaking with the man recovering from his stroke, who may never walk again even with therapy, that it came home. The difference between the young and the old is simple: The young dream and the old have forgotten their dreams. The old wander the roadsides looking for something to keep them in beans. Even as I immerse myself in social media, gleaning the side of the social media road for original thoughts and ideas - or even better ones - I wonder how many sit at their desks doing the same things.

Hoping someone can dream for them.

It's not to say that this is always the case. I wouldn't even say that it is the majority of people who use social media - but it is apparent that there is a void in many people's lives that social media somehow - hopefully- fills. And what is that void? Is it the discussions and ideas? For me, that is true - geographically, I'm almost never around people interested in the same things. But that can't be true for everyone or the world would be a lot more to my liking since everyone would be me.

There's an old man in a bed maybe 100 yards away from me right now, over a wall and through some louvres, who once dreamt of traveling. Over decades of his life he never realized that dream - the constant pressure of business and finance kept him hermetically sealed from his dreams. In that, he is not too different from the man in the picture.

Even as we waterboard ourselves in the sea of social media, we need to remember to dream. Social media means nothing unless you bring something to the collective. And to bring something of worth to the collective, you have to be innovative. To innovate, you have to imagine. To imagine, you have to dream.

Don't just tour your prison. Break out of the box. Breathe.

Many people think writing is not a lot of work. Writers may lounge around, drinking coffee or tea, and they may have a distant look in their eye. Rarely does one see a writer physically writing, but I wonder - where do people think all this writing comes from? It amuses me, as much as when I heard artists classify engineers as being unable to appreciate art. A funny thing, artists who typically don't like being classified or categorized doing the same to others.

But if you hand an artist a bunch of spare parts, they may make it into a form that represents something. Hand it to an engineer, you'll probably get something that does something. Are functional works like an engineer would create something that could be considered art? It must be, or Shakespeare would be an engineer. And, if Shakespeare was not an engineer, he probably would not have been interested in a poetic turn of phrase or a powerful metaphor. He probably would not have used them. And so, he probably would not have written anything... and so we probably would never have heard of him. But we have heard of him - so he must have been an artist. An artist who created functional works.