Journey of imagination.......from K

As I have time to think – to really delve into ideas, I realize that my imagination does not go much beyond my reality. My disparate thoughts fall into memories both good and wincing, but rarely moves beyond. Even before this trip began, I could not fathom my daily routine. Friends asked what I feared and I could not come up with an answer. My fears were limited to the problems we had already faced and survived, so why fear them now? Is lack of imagination linked with a lack of intelligence? Einstein certainly seemed to think so: Imagination is more important than knowledge.

So I sit on the bow of my boat and I push my thoughts beyond my past experiences. I play the “what if” game, trying to imagine the wildest possibilities: a whale surfacing to port and rolling our boat; a mermaid teasing me with a flip of her tail; Pat suddenly jumping ship, leaving me to captain Senara. Would I panic? No, I would do what I’ve always done, the necessary jobs to survive. I would respond to the moment, to the crisis. I would rely on myself as I always have.

So how does one develop imagination? I crave creative, unexpected ideas to entertain myself, to solve problems, to make myself – and perhaps others – a little more interesting. As I journey through my 'middle' years, I try desperately, sometimes with futility, to find my childhood life of imaginary friends who accompanied me to secret forts in the palmetto bushes of Miami, but these friends have lost their voices. To spark ideas, I purposely read diverse books at the same time. "The History of God" provides surprising allusions to my articles in Sail Magazine. Interestingly, I find more blessed spirituality in the sailing articles than Karen Armstrong’s rhetoric on religions. I open myself to authors I used to avoid, fully immersing myself in their storytelling worlds.

But alas, I realize that my obsessive reading is an attempt to live some else’s imagination – not my own. Solution: write my own imagination. This is where I freeze. Yet, if I write what I know, I ignore creativity. Do I try to meld the two? Ahhh, it’s painful to change the truth. Stephen King’s advice haunts me: begin a story and go where it takes you. That advice sounds strangely familiar... sort of like taking a sail trip. But writing is so much scarier -- because the journey is on the inside.