A Failure of Imagination

Insecurity, and all the non-constructive feelings it spawns, shoves wisdom and imagination out of its way when it overtakes our public dialogue. There is a highly predictable connection between the prevailing feeling state, or state of mind, in which we spend our time and the thinking and actions that make sense to us and seem possible to us.

It has been difficult to watch the erosion of common sense and wisdom as insecurity has infected more and more of our responses to critical issues over the past several weeks. It seems the news is filled with, and thriving on, reports of people in increasingly insecure states of mind struggling to deal with huge challenges. The missing piece in all our discussions seems to be the need for clarity, quiet minds, wisdom, insight and imagination to solve problems we've never seen before.

But there is hope in the innate and extraordinary resiliency we all share as human beings. We are always capable of dropping down from a secure state of mind that supports creative solutions to the most daunting problems, into insecurity, which blocks that capacity, as I've tried to illustrate in the chart below. But we are equally capable of turning around. At any moment, our heads clear, insight bubbles to the surface, we "see" what we're doing with out own thinking, and we can just as easily reverse the arrows and come back to peace and clarity. 

What does it take? Wanting to feel less stressed; knowing that it's in us to be at ease with our thinking and elicit our highest quality ideas; trusting that the only way to keep negative thinking going is to hang onto it. As soon as we let any thought go, the natural flow of thinking resumes and the quality of our ideas and feelings, like everything else in life, moves towards balance.