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Dalton
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Kris Kristofferson was recently on NPR’s Fresh Air and said something that makes perfect sense to me. “I’ve always felt that many of the people I admire are figments of their own imagination. Willie Nelson and Mohammed Ali were particularly successful at that – at imagining themselves and then living up to what they imagined themselves to be.” Kris makes it clear that we even have the power to imagine ourselves to be things for which we are not ideally suited by our body build and temperament. He says, “When I think back to when I was writing my first songs when I was eleven years old down in Brownsville, Texas, I think I imagined myself into a pretty full life. I was certainly not equipped by God to be a football player, but I got to be one, and I got to be a Ranger and a paratrooper and a helicopter pilot and a boxer and things I don’t think I was built for. I just imagined them.” This great truth of the power of imagination had dawned on me by the time I was twenty six. I was teaching school and having a hard time caring for my little family so I took a weekend job guarding the old Hamilton Bank at 7th And Market. One night on a lawyer’s desk I saw a book titled “How To Make a Habit of Success.” It teased my curiosity so I took it to the lobby and read it that weekend, making copious notes. It asked you to list some things you had done that brought you great pleasure and satisfaction. The author said to not list things other’s praised you for but only the things you personally loved. Then he said to list the kind of skills it took to accomplish those things. I started taking actions along the lines of those great loves and within three months I had doubled my salary. In a short time, I doubled it again. How? By simply imagining myself to be a success at things I had enjoyed and taking small actions in those directions. Maybe we should call this “imagineering” -- engineering our lives according to the images we feed into our consciousness. The only trick is making sure those images are in harmony with our true desires rather than the urgings and promptings of friends and family who often think they know exactly what we should do and be. I accidentally discovered how we cluster ideas around things we love enabling us to rapidly accomplish them. I was writing an album of inspirational music to raise money for a wheelchair for a nursing home. Those songs came to me so fast at times I could hardly write them down. Same thing with a tribute album I wrote for Bessie Smith. Ditto for a love song album and for an acoustic blues project. This “imagineering” is not taught in any school that I know of because it might be hard to validate it through research. So let me share the thoughts I have had about it and let you test them. It seemed clear to me when I was doing those recording projects that my creative mind was going to work on any template I provided. Once I thought through a project and decided to do it and attained enthusiasm for it, the ideas started rolling in. It was not unusual for me to have to pull my car off on the shoulder of the road to write down the good stuff coming to me. It is an exciting thing to experience. Make sure that every template you place in creative mind is something you want or really need to do. It works best with things you deeply desire but I have seen it work on things that were just needful. Kris is right. We are figments of our own imagination.
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