Thinking is overrated.
If you know me well, you might be laughing. I think all the time. I’m curious. I’m a planner. I think about how things will happen, what needs to be said, how to put my classes together. I think about how the universe works.
But I don’t want to be stuck in thinking, because thinking will never let me experience the unlimited possibilities that life can offer. For years I have thought about how not to think. But it was only after I started writing fiction every day that I really began to understand that thinking travels along well-worn paths, and it is imagination that leaps out of ruts.
Thinking knows how things work, how things are, how things should be. Sometimes useful. But extremely limited.
Thinking that man wasn’t made to fly, never made an airplane.
Thinking that light only comes from the sun, never made any of the light sources we now all enjoy.
Thinking that people over a certain age don’t, and can’t, do some things, shuts down lives long before their time.
When I was a child, I remember being told by well-meaning relatives that women over thirty shouldn’t wear their hair in ponytails. I heard my mother say when she was in her thirties that she was too old to exercise. Recently, I have listened to people younger than me say they are too old to learn how to use smartphones, or computers, or… well you’ve heard it too.
Thinking says, “that’s how it is, that’s how it will always be.” And thinking like that creates prisons of our own making.
A few weeks ago a yoga teacher put the words “LET GO” on a three by five card in front of all our mats. All through the class, he kept saying, “let go.”
Let go of the tension in your muscles. Let go of thinking about how it is supposed to look. Let go of judgment of yourselves and others. Let go of thinking. It was hard. We needed that constant reminder. Letting go is not the behavior we are taught, it is something we have to learn for ourselves.
We are learning to let go and to substitute thinking with the willingness to feel and imagine what can’t be seen with the five senses. Can’t be found in the logical part of our brains.
The five senses and the logical parts of our brain do a great job of taking care of what needs to be taken care of, but what about living life’s possibilities?
Possibilities, inventions, creativity in all forms comes in through a different door. It comes through letting go, through imagination, through feelings, through intuition.
None of which can be measured, or stuffed into anything that says, “this is how it is and how it will always be.”
Not everything needs to be figured out.
Those marvelous things we want to experience and do in life come first from a feeling, a desire, an inkling, a wish, an idea. After listening to the imagination and accepting its power, then thinking can kick in as to how to “do it.”
Do you think that this can’t be true? Go ahead, look at all the people who have expanded our world, improved our lives from the simplest thing to the most complex. What did they do first? They imagined something different. They let go.
I am betting that the moments in all our lives that have made us the happiest have come through the imagination door first.
I’ll always be a thinker, but I am learning to be a thinker after I first open the door to imagination.
Why not join me?
Imagine the unlimited possibilities of good as the only power and all that is not good fading away to never be seen, or experienced again.
If enough of us light that light, darkness has no choice but to vanish. Imagine that!
BECA LEWIS coaches, teaches, writes blogs and books, plays with art, and is addicted to reading. She lives in Ohio with her husband and has kids and grandkids scattered across the country.
