The Future Needs Your Imagination

Hello Writers,

I spent ALL morning writing a letter to you but I kept straying off my main point and getting lost in the weeds. So I just deleted the whole shebang. It’s how the creative life goes sometimes.

BUT I DID SAVE THIS NOW POINTLESS GRAPHIC. The world population has almost doubled since I was born. Bananas! (Can you find your own birth year?)

Look at that enormous tidal wave of humanity! We’re all just salty single drops in a vast human ocean.

Anyways.

My inspiration for today’s deleted letter was this quote:

“Without the imagination we can do no more than spin the future out of the logic of the present.” - Lewis Hyde, The Gift

The logic of the present… is kind of depressing.

After my bookstore closed and my dreams were dead and I sat alone, half-drowned, on the sea floor for a year, several people—artists, actually—reminded me that the only way forward is to create. So that’s what I did and it worked.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in regard to the myriad of overwhelming and interconnected problems humanity is facing. We collectively need all the imagination and creativity we can muster right now.

At the same time, human creativity feels under attack. I could go on and on about that, but I won’t. YOU KNOW. I think. So we’ll just leave it there and move on.

Human memory is short. The last few years, the last few decades, the culture that has been roiling all around us feel like everything. The ideas that are prevalent now feel like they’ve always been there. But they haven’t. The cycles of history are so much larger than the last handful of years or even your whole life.

Two prevalent ideas in this present human age are democracy and capitalism and, as such, some of the ways we feel we can most impact the world are through voting and spending (or ‘vote with your dollars’ as people like to say.) Those notions aren’t wrong, but let’s redirect our attention, for a moment, to the power of your own creativity and imagination.

Yours, mine, ours, theirs. There are so many creatively gifted people in the massive living human sea. If you are a recipient of this newsletter, you are surely one of them.

Now more than ever we need to support working artists, and also, if we ourselves are not working artists, we need to value and prioritize our own creative outlets and joys.

So pull your head out of the algorithm. Turn off the constant stream of entertainment and stimuli and relearn how to sit in the quiet. Take your attention back from exploitative tech. Relearn how to be bored. Learn how to focus again and for longer and longer periods of time. Sketch, write, sing, dance, fiddle around in your kitchen or your garden or your tool shed or in your kids’ toy box. Try and do it analogue. Try and do it without showing anyone. Or show someone. No rules.

The logic of the present is going to keep things on the same trajectory they’re on now. Imagine the future you want for yourself, for your loved ones, and for the world. Imagine it. Close your eyes. Live in that dream. Wake up and paint it, sing it, build it, grow it.

I’ve been reading this book slowly over a couple of years. I think I’m going to finish it this week. It was published in the early eighties when the world was half its current population. It is research-heavy and therefore a bit of a slog compared to other creativity books. But I think it was worth reading. Not all good books are easy reads, you know?

Happy Easter, by the way. What a wonderful time to meditate upon light in the darkness, unexpected miracles, new life, new growth, the return of what’s been lost and the healing of what’s been broken.