The Immaculate Imagination

It doesn’t exist.

Imagination is magical, bodacious and healing. It is brilliant, delicious and wicked good fun. It is spontaneous, serendipitous and fortuitous.

However, it is also petulant, needy, insecure and full of tantrums. Starving hungry one minute and then too full to share the next. It gives up easily, has totally unreasonable standards and impossible expectations.

AND, although it is happy to make impromptu appearances it doesn’t at all appreciate being summoned on a dime. ESPECIALLY of it has not been fed properly, regularly and exactly what it wants.

I have been an absentee parent lately.

Demanding, not terribly attentive and full of endless excuses.

I can feel my imagination rolling its precocious eyeballs at me as I explain the challenges of taking care of a family while working and being active in the school–blah di blah-blah-blah!

I am used to being in charge of my own little fiefdoms.

And this kind of tempestuous behavior is usually not tolerated. However, it is a bit of a dilemma since my imagination is essentially what fuels my happiness and general wellbeing.

This forces me into a position of humble apology and heart-felt gratitude. But as I say to our boys, apologies are meaningless unless you change your actions moving forward.

My problem is once I’ve fallen out of rhythm with the mysterious heartbeat of my imagination, I treat getting it back like a business plan.

I get prescriptive.

One hour in nature. Twenty minutes meditation. Forty minutes reading. Bubble bath. Call inspiring friend. Enter… imagination.

I feel safe in organized, highly ordered environments. But, frustratingly, creativity and imagination usually come in messy, unpredictable, out-of-the-blue experiences. It requires paying close attention and letting go of control.

Ugghh.

I am a big fan of immaculate.

I love kitchens, bathrooms, landscaping and To Do Lists with this quality. It is, of course, impossible to sustain but there is a kind of calming satisfaction in the initial achievement, however short-lived.

No matter. Imagination could care less.

Like Elsa in the movie Frozen, it sing-chants Let it go… Let it go…

And so I do. Reluctantly, respectfully, restoratively– I let go and once again become the passenger that we all are anyway on this grand and fantastical ride.