Imagination holds the key to humanity. It is the mainspring of all  progress, to create the envisioned reality from existent reality.  It is present throughout all human endeavour , encompassing technology, science, sport, and all the literary, audio and visual arts.  It must therefore be critical that we encourage creativity to continue our evolution.  The Western culture has exaggerated the benefits of productivity, and capitalism in recent history.  There is no doubt that a great deal of human resource has to be spent on producing the resources required to feed and deliver care to humankind, but the  capitalist model delivers it with such inadequate recognition of the vast majority, that it can only be seen as a flawed model.  The vast amount of wealth, in the ownership of so few results in a level of injustice and inhumanity that we must question.

Our education system does not encourage imagination, it requires rigid adherence to unimaginative syllabuses delivered across rigid time scales, demanding the student to merely regurgitate ‘stuff’ , and is unable to respond adequately to genuine curiosity and enquiry.  We do not learn in our system, or even learn how to learn.  We download nuggets of information, and hope that some of them are ingested and developed by the few students diligent enough to work around the obstacles of the system.

As a society, we need to renew our hunger for imaginative appetite.  All around we are made comfortable by the increasing technoligies, yet still hunger for meaning, for the feeling of aliveness that is lacking.  We all recognise the sleepinesss, and the weariness that fill our complex, sophisticated ,modern lives. What we failing to engage with is our creativity. We are growing increasingly reliant on passively receiving the creativity of others, and in doing so, become increasingly dissatisfied with our own imagination, seeing it as inferior to the models streamed to us via computers, television screens, and audio interfaces. The people I see around me who are most satisfied with their lives, are those who engage in their own creativity, whether that be in the work they do , or in the hobbies they pursue. They are engaged in making something for themselves, using their imagination to do so, seeing something new, something with possibility.  What it doesn’t necessarily promote is productivity, in the moment, but in the fulness of time, productivity will always prosper , given an environment where endeavour and imagination work together.  Here endeth today’s lesson.  Sometimes things just have to come out, don’t you find that?

 

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