Imagination

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” - Einstein

I’m finally starting to realize that I have an unusually vivid imagination. I not only love, but need stories. I am very empathetic. I get spooked easily in the dark. I process and retain information visually; I can remember the outfits and colors from significant events that happened years ago. I envision the future more easily in terms of my own projections than logical reality.

There are great things about imagination: it compels me to create, to sketch or play or write. It makes reading novels an acutely immersive pleasure: I inhabit the fictional world, speak the dialogue, picture the scenery and movements of characters in my mind. It’s a world that I can live in and go back to even while say, doing the dishes or supposedly-parenting my children. I enjoy colors—seeing what hues are trending, envisioning how I would redo a room’s décor, noting pairings in a good outfit. I’m easily awed by nature, in the grandiose or miniature. My career is visual: compared with other specialties, it’s based much more on what I see over what a patient tells me. One removes a cataract more by sight than feel.

And being highly imaginative makes parenting so much fun. I can invent silly rhymes (my latest one, after Eric got frustrated when Ellie tried to tell him he was wrong about something: “thank you for the education, I’ll use my imagination!”), spin any situation into a narrative, craft spontaneous things from a motley of items. If imagination is what connects our perceptions, what builds fantasy landscapes, what powers wonder, then kids live in the stuff, and being prone to it myself helps me connect with them.

But it’s not all good. In a talk on cultural imagination, David Brooks quoted someone as saying being alone with your imagination at night can be like opening a “drawer of knives.” It’s easy to be affected by fears. Sometimes I can’t stop picturing over and over how I should have done a particular step of a surgery differently. I’m seized with scenarios of my kids getting kidnapped and have a hard time letting them go outside unsupervised. I’m particularly affected by shows or books that are too frightening or sexually explicit. I don’t like reading about tragedy unless I know I have the space to process it. The only scary movie I ever let myself watch was “The Sixth Sense,” and I remember suffering from insomnia while backpacking through Europe years later because of it.

Part of discovering myself as an imaginative person—which, as a daughter of an engineer father and a no-nonsense mother, is coming to me rather later in life—is delighting in all the ways imagination helps me connect with my kids, create and enjoy creation, and moves me forward into the future with vision. But part of it is also discovering that I need an unusual kind of discipline: I need to be more intentional than most about my mental life. I must be careful of what I feed my mind and eyes, about what I let my thoughts stray to. What I think isn’t peripheral; it is the world I inhabit, and therefore how I am changed. In a way, it is what I worship and who I become.

Francis Parkman was an American historian who longed for the West as a young man. He later described his younger self: “His thoughts were always in the forest, whose features possessed his waking and sleeping dreams, filling him with vague cravings impossible to satisfy.” I live much of life with my thoughts in the forest of my imaginings—and, to follow the metaphor, if I feel I have never really arrived, it is because, as C. S. Lewis wrote, “all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so.” When one day we experience our bodies, our earth, our loved ones, and our God as it is meant to be, maybe we’ll find it was less about what we knew than what we imagined.