I don’t like to worry, but I am prone to it. The best solution I found is to disempower the worry, but I must say I am deeply concerned about what I am calling an imagination deficit among adults. Too many people are spending their days online commenting on what other people have done, rather than creating things themselves. Artificial intelligence is being marketed to the masses as a way to not have to think anymore, even though its greatest potential is unlocking new inventions and eradicating inequities. The fashion trends are dull but bright at the same time. People are being led to think that we have reached the end of human innovation on earth, hence the latest obsession with space.

Even social movements are struggling to catch on because people are so disconnected from each other and their imaginations. A group of activists floated the idea of a nationwide general strike in the United States of America on December 1, where people are being asked not to work and not to purchase anything non-essential. From what I’ve read, the strike would be to raise awareness around income inequality since the stock market has seen record numbers at a time when food insecurity is high. There was an activist/commentator on Instagram who asked her followers, what would it take for them to be able to participate in such a strike? She specifically asked them to use the comments section to state the need, however, instead of stating needs people in her comments section explained reasons as to why they couldn’t participate in such a strike. They did not state opposition to the strike, which is more of what I expected, but rather a lack of imagination around how resources could flow to them in the absence of work and consumption. What I recognize is that the activist was asking people to lean into community, but in order to lean into community, you must have an active, healthy imagination.

Then there’s the resentment around spaces of imagination. It is human nature to assume that institutions you do not know how to access are unavailable to you. It’s true that education and art spaces are as guilty of exclusivity and gatekeeping as they are of extending social good. Texas Christian University reported that the administration is eliminating their programs on race and gender studies, and many people cheered for that decision online. However, what people may not know is that from these two fields of study emerge policies that prohibit gender discrimination in school and at work, paid maternity leave, Title IX, the Civil Rights Act, child tax credits, and fair housing. The study of the least of these– when it’s not rooted in exploitation– benefits the masses, which is in fact an act of imagination.

Too many people think they want contraction when what they really want is scale.

Years ago, I read a book called “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear” by Elizabeth Gilbert. When I first started reading the book, I thought it was going to be about ways to jog creativity or brain teasers, but what I found was something much more important and uncharted. It is a book about what it is to design your life, which is to say that (1) you can design your life and (2) take a creative approach to doing so.

A couple of years after reading “Big Magic,” I encountered Tricia Hersey’s book, “Rest is Resistance” where she talks about the “dream space” as a place that can only be accessed through rest. In the dream space, you can create a new approach to your life and solutions to problems emerge. Rest is a place where we can become our most empowered in authentic selves. (Her manifesto on rest is deeply rooted in the book “Black Liberation Theology,” which I have not read yet.)

Then, I recently read Imani Perry’s new book, “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of my People” about how throughout the African Diaspora, the color blue appears is a symbol of imagination, a pathway  to some higher wider, deeper life, or an expression of the frustration of not being able to access one. From the Blues to blue jeans to Haint blue, she excavates the connection between indigo and imagination. 

Trusting people to show up for you is in fact something that emerges from imagination, from my perspective, because faith emerges from imagination. If we adopt the biblical definition of faith as the subject of things hoped for the evidence of that, which is unseen, then faith and imagination have to coexist. You cannot have one without the other. In order to believe that what does not exist in front of you could exist, you must be able to imagine it.

Today, in the United States of America, I don’t know how much imagining people are doing. I think too many people are tethered to the past, completely overwhelmed by the present, and have no faith in a hopeful future. I don’t know how you connect or evolve a nation like that. What I do know is that the ability to design a life, and thereby the world, that you wish to see begins in you. In the same way hurt people hurt people, affirmed people affirm people. 

So, as I see people wince about governmental shutdowns and unemployment, I push us to ask ourselves to open up our collective imagination to other possibilities. If the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, then what are we willing to disrupt or erupt for justice? How can we take care of each other in the face of corruption? And for those who don’t wanna because this isn’t what they signed up for, then how do we allow each other to imagine ourselves in new places?

This is where the hard unglamorous work of being able to look at yourself in the mirror without looking away begins. It’s in every affirmation on a Post-It note. It’s in every kind word we say to ourselves and the people around us.  It’s in every smile you offer to people no matter their race or socioeconomic condition. Imagination is an inner connection that manifests outwardly. 

What are you imagining today? Can you fathom a world free of cruelty? What are you doing in your home to create it?