The Return of Possibility

I've been noticing something lately that I haven't experienced in years.

I've been daydreaming.

Not intentionally.

Not as some kind of practice.

It just keeps happening.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a park in New York City.

There was a girls' softball game taking place on the field in front of me.

Parents were passing around coffee and donuts.

Someone had stretched a tarp from the fence to a nearby tree to create shade over the dugout.

I remember staring at it and wondering how they had managed to get the bungee cords attached so high up in the branches.

I remember the sound of the game.

The conversations.

The movement.

For a few minutes, I wasn't trying to get anywhere.

I wasn't checking anything.

I wasn't solving anything.

I was simply sitting in a park watching a softball game that had nothing to do with me.

And somewhere in the middle of it, I found myself drifting.

Not into plans.

Not into problems.

Not into the future in any practical sense.

I found myself imagining.

What would it feel like to live in New York?

What kind of home would I have?

What coffee shop would become my coffee shop?

What route would I walk home?

The strange thing wasn't the content of the daydream.

The strange thing was that I was daydreaming at all.

The feeling came first.

A kind of ease.

A complete immersion.

And I remember suddenly asking myself:

What is happening?

Why do I feel this way?

Because I hadn't felt that way in years.

When I was a child, I spent enormous amounts of time in my imagination.

Entire afternoons disappeared into stories I invented.

I read fiction constantly.

Looking back, I don't think I understood why I loved novels so much.

I wasn't reading to learn something.

I was reading to inhabit other lives.

To discover possibilities that didn't yet belong to me.

Somewhere along the way, that changed.

I don't remember losing it.

At the time, I don't think I even missed it.

I had too much to do.

Too much to build.

Too much to understand.

I only realized it had been gone once it returned.

My life became more serious.

More focused.

More directed.

I became increasingly concerned with mastering things.

Building things.

Understanding things.

And somewhere along the way, the wandering stopped.

Looking back, I don't remember much daydreaming during some of the most anxious years of my life.

My attention always seemed to have a job.

There was always something to solve.

Something to anticipate.

Something to manage.

An anxious mind rarely wanders.

It scans.

Monitors.

Protects.

It keeps watch.

I've started wondering if that isn't one of anxiety's greatest costs.

Not simply that it makes us suffer.

But that it quietly narrows the range of futures we're capable of imagining.

The mind becomes so occupied protecting the present that it loses its relationship with possibility.

Children seem almost immune to this.

The future is still open.

Nothing has hardened yet.

Everything feels available.

Perhaps that's why they drift so easily into imagination.

Not because they're escaping reality.

Because reality hasn't finished introducing itself.

The more I've sat with this, the less convinced I am that daydreaming is a distraction.

I'm beginning to suspect it serves a purpose.

Carl Jung believed the unconscious often compensates for the attitude of the conscious mind. If we become too identified with one way of living, another part of us quietly begins moving in the opposite direction, attempting to restore balance.

I've started wondering whether imagination sometimes works this way.

Not as entertainment.

Not as escape.

As compensation.

If life becomes too narrow...

Perhaps imagination begins widening it again.

Not by giving us answers.

By reminding us there are still questions we haven't thought to ask.

That feels remarkably similar to what I witness during sound baths.

People often emerge describing memories, images, ideas, or insights that seemed to arrive on their own.

No one was trying to think about those things.

If anything, they were trying to stop thinking altogether.

They were simply lying down.

Listening.

Perhaps that matters.

One of the things we aim for during a sound bath is a deeply relaxed state often associated with theta brainwave activity.

It's an interesting territory.

Not asleep.

Not fully engaged with the outside world.

Something in between.

The place where imagination, memory, intuition, and insight begin speaking to one another.

I've started wondering if what we're really creating isn't relaxation.

It's permission.

Permission for the mind to stop defending itself.

Permission to stop managing every thought.

Permission to wander.

And perhaps wandering isn't the opposite of purpose.

Perhaps it's one of the ways purpose finds us.

Lately I've felt more hopeful than I have in a very long time.

Which is strange.

The world doesn't seem especially hopeful.

There are plenty of reasons to become cynical.

And yet something in me has become more open.

The future doesn't feel finished yet.

It feels full of directions I haven't discovered.

Perhaps that's what hope really is.

Not believing everything will work out.

But remaining available to possibilities that haven't introduced themselves yet.

I've come to think that's what I lost all those years ago.

Not daydreaming.

Not fiction.

Not childhood.

Possibility.

And perhaps that's what I've really been finding again.

Not a different future.

A different relationship with the future.

One spacious enough to let my imagination wander once more.