Imagine if you will…

It’s been a long and grinding year, from the shotgun start of the presidential primaries to the historic election of Barack Obama and the concurrent (though unrelated) collapse of financial markets worldwide. You were there – you know – and you don’t need me to offer up yet another post-mortem on a year that can only be categorized as monumentally historic. Besides, the story of these times is so far from written that summarizing right now seems pointless.

Instead, I humbly request that I be among the first to wish you peace, hope and better sleep in the new year. Don’t snort: the chance of my wish coming true is at least as strong as that of me getting a pony for Christmas.

Please don’t feel responsible for making my equine holiday wish a reality; at this point in my life, if I ever decide that I must have my own pony I’ll find a way to make it happen. And you can find a way to grant yourself peace and restful nights: it’s actually within your reach, and I’m going to share the secret with you now.

Remember when you were little and it was time to get ready for bed? Your parents would have you put away your stuff, take a bath and put on your jammies. Sometimes you’d have a snack and then crawl into your warm bed with a book or the radio playing quietly. Eventually you’d turn off the light and drift down into unconsciousness, thoughts of the day just past or the day ahead curling like mist around your dream factory, priming the pump for the night to come. Your details might be different from these, but the outcome is the same: a graceful transition from the chaos of the day into the solace of sleep, a chance to regenerate and face the new morning head-on.

I neglected this ritual for nearly three decades. As a typical young adult I flew from bed to school or work, from obligated time into a frenzied social life, slamming back into bed late and crashing hard (or staring at the ceiling for hours) until my alarm clock pulled me with a squawk from my mattress once again. I didn’t prioritize it as a single mom and new business owner, either. How could I? Time becomes so compressed for grownups, until you look in the mirror one morning and realize that you’ve aged, the lines and gray hair informing you in no uncertain terms that there’s no traveling backwards.

You can’t stop time and the inexorable hunger of its advances. Time is like fire: always consuming you, even as it paves the way for new beginnings. But you can steal from time – a moment here and there – and reclaim yourself. I can attest that the moments you take back from the voracity of the daily grind are well-invested, replenishing your under-valued emotional and spiritual reservoir and providing a source of strength from which to draw in times of need.

This is how I do it: before I fall asleep, I think about things I’ve learned recently. I try not to masticate on problem-solving or worry, but rather just roam the wide world of knowing. For instance, this year I learned that there is no focused scholarly effort to study, understand or preserve the Great Wall of China. How can that be? I also learned that no matter how hard you try to make everyone happy and healthy, the people in your life have to process situations in their own way, and sometimes things just are what they are until they evolve into something else. I learned a few things about baking – always my culinary weakness – that have opened new doors of kitchen creativity. And every once in awhile I buy a lottery ticket, then lay in bed imagining what I would do with millions of dollars.

Everyone has something that fascinates them, whether it’s personal reflection or a random magazine article that unexpectedly resonates beyond the reading. The secret, I believe, to reclaiming yourself (after all, in the end, it is your life), is to re-acquaint yourself with your childhood friend, imagination, who waits forever patiently like Pooh for a grown-up Christopher Robin. Imagination doesn’t need your adult self to create fantasy worlds that absorb your waking thoughts for endless summers on end; it’s content to play whatever role you have available. And in these times of great uncertainty, imagination is one of the keys to hope. The daily churn of consuming routine is not serving the world – or the people in it – well, and far-out possibilities must now be imagined. It starts with each of us.

At VITAL, we reconnected this month with our collective imaginations in making predictions for 2009. Some may seem absurd, but Amy Elliott’s prediction for 2008 that the 1890s would make a roaring comeback has borne out in the profusion of string bands and crinoline overtaking the local music scene, which proves just about anything can happen. Read these and then take your own guesses: but don’t spend too much time worrying about what’s possible – you just never know. VS

Click here to read VITAL’s predictions for 2009. Prepare to laugh, to cry and to think some of them are kind of dumb. But fun. 🙂