The dark side of the imagination
I’ve always been restless.
It’s served me well much of the time.
I don’t accept things because ‘that’s how they are’.
I don’t accept ‘that’s how I am’ either.
I ask ‘why?’
I ask ‘what about?’ (of myself and of the world).
I wonder, mull and imagine different.
Imagination drives my restlessness and guides my choices. It’s encouraged me to do things other people didn’t do, and I’ve lived a life of huge richness because of that.
I’ve run training residencies in remote valleys of the Himalayas and on the beaches of remote Greek Islands.
I’ve walked away from secure careers.
I’ve met and spent time with a huge diversity of people in a rich tapestry of cultures.
I’ve tried many things — some worked some didn’t.
I’ve always been driven by a desire to experience, not stay stuck in ‘I wish that…’.
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My restlessness has also overwhelmed me at times.
There’s a darkness within the light of curiosity a restless imagination shines on the world.
I saw it the other day.
I was out walking at dusk. Night comes early here, though less so than in the darkest months.
I live in the wilds of Ireland. With the tail-end of a gale blowing past me, I saw the yellow lights of a house across the water from where I walked.
It looked so homely.
So welcoming.
So safe — to me, out in the cold and possible storm.
‘How wonderful it would be to live in such a place’, I thought, ‘to be safe inside a warm house in a beautiful landscape near the sea’.
Then, a second thought.
‘I live in a warm house in a beautiful landscape close to the sea’.
I was longing for what I have.
I was longing to be who I am.
I was longing for the life I’m living.
Why then did I feel this yearning?
What was I yearning for?
That’s where the dark side of the restless desire for growth, for new experience, for seeing through others’ eyes, reveals itself.
Am I restless for another set of experiences, or am I restless to be someone else?
To live as someone else?
To escape being me?
Is my restlessness a desire to obliterate myself and be new-born as someone else?
I can trace some psychology in this.
I lost the security of home (an exoskeleton for the emerging self) when I was sent to a boarding school at 8. For several years I was bullied while there. I was a noisy creative scruffy boy in a macho anti-intellectual culture.
I learned to wish I was someone else.
Life would be easier if I was someone else.
I would be less anxious if I was someone else.
I would not be the target of violence and contempt if I was someone else.
I would not have been exiled from home if I was someone else.
Part of the driver of my imagination has always been my attempt to be someone else.
Denying self.
I’ve always rejected either/or thinking.
At the heart of my work in Self-With-Others is a profound sense that binary thinking almost always does more harm than good. Few things we think of as ‘bad’, viewed differently, could not be considered ‘good’. Few people who we disapprove of, if we viewed them through different eyes, might not be seen as laudable.
I distrust binary thinking because it over-simplifies. It also clarifies though, and can lead to decisive (if somtimes misguided) action..
I prefer the sophistication of non-binary thinking.
There’s a downside to complex thinking though — the mirror of the darkness of my restless imagination.
I struggle to decide, unequivocally, whether I want to aim for one sort of life or another.
I want both.
Even if two choices are mutually incompatible, I want both anyway.
I want to experience what it would be to live one life, and a different one, when each cancels the other out.
I want to be in the heart of in the noise of a city, and also in a small warm house on the edge of the sea.
I want to be the centre of community and also I want to be left alone.
I want to be known and respected and also (like a boy who lived inside years of bullying), I want to be entirely ignored.
Not either/or.
Both.
Such imagining gives me a rich inner life. It deepens my sense of wonder at the world.
It also can lead me to be dissatisfied with every choice I make. When I achieve something I’ve yearned for, I regret the path not followed, the life not lived, the fruit not plucked from the tree of possibility.
I see myself, even now as I grow older and value quietness more, yearning for things I’ll never have, things I wouldn’t like if I did have, and things I already have.
This restless yearning stops me living in the moment with the things that are here for me right now.
It stops me being with me.
I value my restless mind and imagination.
I need to notice though when I’m wanting different experiences, and when I am wanting myself — as I know myself — no longer to exist.
I value also, and increasingly, the sense of peace that comes from finding stillness at the heart of now, and choosing, for a while, to rest there.
That perhaps is the work of the next phase of life — not expanding my exploration of ‘what if’, but deepening into the detail of ‘what is’.
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I coach and mentor Artists, Educators, Spiritual Workers and anyone who believes things can be better. I’ll hold a space for you if you’re ready, and together we’ll move from holding back to stepping forward.
Be in touch if you’d like to talk: [email protected]