🎵 Imagination, life is your creation
Did it work? Do you have Barbie Girl stuck in your head now too?
Hello!
I’m thrilled to be finally sending this out, especially knowing that some of you will automatically receive it in your inboxes because you signed up previously. If you didn’t and wish you had, here’s a conveniently placed button which can help you do just that.
I read a Harvard Business Review article sometime in early lockdown titled We Need Imagination Now More Than Ever. Although I wouldn’t recommend you read it, the headline did stick with me. (If HBR is your vibe, then here). As the first few weeks of lockdown progressed, I got over the self-imposed pressure of sitting at my laptop all day trying to work (I was really just reading anything and everything that came across my screen). I found myself a patch of Autumn sunshine and started reading books - three of which neatly come together in this post by offering some insight into the broad topic of imagination.
I’ll start with Dune, written by Frank Herbert in 1965, which is the best-selling science fiction book of all time. Despite it being “perhaps the greatest novel in the science-fiction canon” according to this 2015 Guardian article (also well worth a read), I’ve been surprised to learn that few of my friends have read it. But then again, I only discovered the Dune universe of sand and politics and giant worms and spice earlier this year when we played the board game. (Which is absolutely incredible! Just watch this review).
The story is set in the distant future long after humanity has developed interstellar travel and explored and settled on many different worlds, one of which is Arrakis (referred to as Dune). The series of books explore complex themes that are as relevant today as they were in the 1960s, if not more urgent now: the long-term survival of the human species, human evolution, planetary science and ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics, economics and power (source: The Internet).
Where did these ideas come from? As a journalist, Frank Herbert had been asked to write a magazine article on a dune ecosystem in Oregon. He was so enthralled while doing his research that he would end up spending six years, supported by his breadwinner wife, creating the incredibly detailed universe of Dune. Although the first novel wasn’t appreciated immediately (the draft was rejected by 20 publishing houses before it was accepted), there is a solid fan base still to this day. For good reason. Consider this gem:
“Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.”
The impacts that Frank Herbert’s imagination has had on the world are significant, but I wish they could be even bigger. It is widely cited that many of the ideas that George Lucas rocked the world with in Star Wars, originated from Dune. An example here is the influence of the Bene Gesserit as a source of inspiration for the Jedi. But as this article points out, where Dune is a story for adults, Star Wars is a story for kids (which adults still happen to love, myself included):
“Baked into the core of Dune’s premise is a critique of a government structure that relies on a dismissing natural resource, and how non-humanist political policies destroy entire populations, but also have grave ecological consequences. Comparatively, Star Wars is mostly concerned with good guys making sure the Death Star doesn’t go zap before they can make it go boom.”
Science fiction has a major role to play in how we think about our possible futures. As a space for speculative ideas about the advancement of science and technology, we can explore the impacts that might be created in the safety of a made-up world that connects ideas to people who might otherwise remain strangers.
Frank Herbert’s story about how he came to create the Dune universe might seem quite extreme, but for what it’s worth, he remembers it like this:
“I don’t worry about inspiration or anything like that…. Later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, “Well, now it’s writing time and now I’ll write.”
I realise not everyone can spend five years making up an imaginary universe but does imagination always need to carry such a sense of grandeur? Absolutely not! Defined simply by John Dewey (an American philosopher):
Imagination is the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise.
I was trying to think about the first time I learnt this lesson about imagination and recalled a moment with an influential figure or rather, figurine, in my life, Barbie.
While some of the friends I played Barbies with might have been caught up in the clothes to dress them up in and finding creative ways to mutilate their hair, I was more interested in the tiny worlds I could create for them. For me, it was all about the relationships between them and the adventures they would go on. Just like many of the other games I’d play when I was young, I could spend hours tangled in a world I had entirely made up.
My favourite one was a super cool Gymnast Barbie that I think was given to me by my aunt from Vancouver, Canada (👋 Hi Lynnie!). Although she (Barbie, not my aunt) was still not very realistic in terms of human dimensions, she had bendy knees and elbows and didn’t have to wear high-heels and I thought that was all pretty cool. It clearly had an impression on me - I dressed up as gymnast Barbie for my 21st (theme: Playground).
Regardless of the toy, all children spend a lot of time in their imagination through the games that they play - it’s how we develop our personal understanding of how the world works. The process of capturing a pretend narrative and combining it with the reality of one’s experience in a playful setting is fundamental to how we learn. This brings me to the second book I read called Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul written by Stuart M. Brown Jr, a doctor who founded the National Institute for Play in California.
Did you know that all animals on this planet who have a brain, play to learn? It’s the way our brains grow and explore new pathways. The research shows that play seems to be one of the most advanced ways that nature has invented to allow a complex brain to create itself!
The book, which shares a lot of interesting research on play behaviour in animals, goes on to suggest that for humans, the ability to create simulations of life may be play’s most valuable benefit. If we can experience situations in our imagination that we have never encountered before, we can still learn from them. We have the power to create possibilities that have never existed - but may in the future. It turns out (according to this neurological research) that your brain lights up in the same way if you’re imagining something or experiencing it in reality. This same study suggested that imagination could be a powerful tool in helping people get over phobias or post-traumatic stress - not by imagining something good when you feel bad, but rather being able to imagine the threat in a safe environment where you can make different connections to tell your brain how you feel about it.
So why, when we have this super cool ability as humans, do we not use it? Why the need for that Harvard Business Review article?
Thinking about the future can be pretty difficult and overwhelming. When I did the Science of Wellbeing course created by Dr Laurie Santos (another lockdown distraction), I learnt that the areas that light up in your brain when you’re feeling anxious are the same as those when you are thinking about the past or the future, but not when you are focused on the present and the here and now (this supports the science of meditation).
But I believe it’s really important to think about the future for the simple reason that the future doesn’t just happen to you. The future that you experience is made by the actions you and others take every day. And there are many different possible futures. Aqua got it right, life is your creation.
So how can you think about the future without getting overwhelmed? Well, a first step could be just simply making time for it to happen. My colleague and friend, Abbas Jamie, motivates this with the following thought experiment.
If you wanted to split your time across tasks in the present (your day-to-day work), near future (what is happening in the next few months and years) or far future (think decades here or further), what percentage would you give each time frame? Do you think it might be fair to say 70% thinking about the present, 20% the near future and 10% the far future? If you were to apply that percentage breakdown to a month, that would mean roughly three days of thinking about the far future and six of the near future!
What about if you are in a strategic/leadership position in an organisation? Should you not be thinking about the future even more? A breakdown of 50, 30 and 20% could seem like a reasonable split, but I certainly don’t know anyone in a senior management position who spends six days a month imagining the far future. They’re far too busy putting out fires and signing off timesheets. We need to find ways to start looking up, because as adrienne maree brown writes:
“There is such urgency in the multitude of crises we face, it can make it hard to remember that in fact it is urgency thinking (urgent constant unsustainable growth) that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in doing deep, slow, intentional work.”
So, although making the time to think is a useful start, there are some other conditions that need to be in place for us to be able to use our imagination. Courtesy of my friend Cris’s very useful Twitter feed, I came across the Imagination Sundial. I’d recommend reading the article in full, but to summarise here, the Sundial is offered as a heuristic or design tool to rebuild the imaginative capacity of people.
My main takeaway from reading this is that while every human has the ability to use their imagination, we certainly don’t all have the capacity to use it. It might be because of long term stress caused by deadlines at work, or choosing to feed the social media addiction rather than spending time outdoors or playing. It might be because of conditions beyond your immediate control like the lack of play in our education system, or any number of trauma and stresses that are becoming exceedingly obvious in this pandemic.
The third and final book I want to share here ties all these ideas together for me. Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown is a book I will very likely write more about sometime because I found it to be filled with magic. adrienne maree brown weaves the worlds of nature and biomimicry, movements and social change, art and science fictions into strategy, with all of herself poured into the pages (I’ll admit this was a bit uncomfortable to read at first and I’ll tell you more about that one day).
“Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice. We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. All organizing is science fiction. If you are shaping the future, you are a futurist. And visionary fiction is a way to practice the future in our minds, alone and together.”
I wanted to highlight what she says about living in the imagination of other people because it is so very important for so many reasons. For anyone in a space created by people that are not like them, it is highly unlikely that the space was imagined for their use and therefore be well-designed. An example of this could be cities that have historically been designed by men that ignore the safety needs of women or playgrounds designed by adults who haven’t considered the perspective of a child half their size. These are examples where natural biases may have occurred, without malicious intent. In South Africa, on the other hand, there are many examples where the malicious intent remains in the tangled legacy of the old oppressive Apartheid system that was explicitly designed to segregate and marginalise certain races.
“Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing our imagination is a symptom of trauma. Reclaiming the right to dream the future, strengthening the muscle to imagine together as Black people, is a revolutionary decolonizing activity.”
One of the main things I love about the book is that Emergent Strategy is about righting these wrongs and creating a better set of futures, inspired by nature:
“I tie transformative justice into emergent strategy because it feels like a non-negotiable aspect of our future, and because the natural world has guidance for us here. Transformative justice, in the context of emergent strategy, asks us to consider how to transform toxic energy, hurt, legitimate pain, and conflict into solutions. To get under the wrong, find a way to coexist, be energy moving towards life, together.”
adrienne maree brown’s work is featured in the article about the Imagination Sundial and I featured her quote about urgent thinking above, but those are not the only links in what is written here. She is also a big fan of Dune (so much so that she writes to the reader to put down her book and go and read it immediately). She praises science fiction in general, and Octavia Butler obsessively. She is such a fan of Octavia Butler, the best known of the very few female African-American science fiction authors, that she has created with others a book called Octavia’s Brood. Octavia’s Brood is a collection of short science fiction stories written about social justice. I’m halfway through it, and look forward to getting back to it once I finally send this newsletter off!
Given that I’ve focused on global issues, and only featured American authors, I wanted to take a moment to make sure you all know about someone from Cape Town who has been contributing to the science fiction world in a big way. Lauren Beukes writes stories that are fun and dark and edgy, and given that she’s from Cape Town, the cities she uses as settings are familiar. If you haven’t read one of her books yet, go now and start with Zoo City which is based in Johannesburg. It’s one of the only books I’ve read more than once.
Meet my friend Tona!
I mentioned in my about page that I would like to use this platform to share some of the amazing things my friends do. I couldn’t think of a better person to pair with the topic of imagination than Tona. Her ability to conceptualise an idea and then execute it to near perfection is one I have seen in very few people.
She’s been Head of Carpentry at AfrikaBurn and she spends many weeks working hard in the desert as part of DPW (Afrikaburn’s Department of Public Works), adding important touches like the tampon flags to mark which loos provide extra measures. Sometimes, of course, some of her ideas are pretty kooky. Like turning the boat we like to party on at AfrikaBurn into a mobile home. But her ability to make that dream into something that has so much style is something that continues to floor me.
Take Sultan and Malta, the horses above, that she made as an example. (If you’re interested in commissioning her to make you one, consider reaching out to her via Instagram (@antoniacronje) or ask me to put you in touch.)
Plus she’s hella fun on a dancefloor, especially when trying to intentionally dance off the beat.
OK, I’ve given you a lot here. It might be too much to take on all at once (especially if you’ve followed every single link), so I’d like to offer you one unifying question to tie it all together.
Which do you value more, knowledge or imagination?
(You can also use this the next time your boss tells to you to quit daydreaming and get back to work.)
Thanks for reading friend! x
p.s. let me know what you thought of this by either replying to this email or dropping a comment on the post.
p.p.s. I’m sorry there aren’t more pictures. I’ll do better next time!
Amazing!
Fantastic Zoe! Loved reading this. I am so chuffed to say that i read Dune ages ago and it was one of those books that was in the "In case of fire, save these" section of the bookcase. Love your ideas about play and imagination and am looking forward to reading the other books in your links. and yes, I'm stealing your quote “There is such urgency in the multitude of crises we face, it can make it hard to remember that in fact it is urgency thinking (urgent constant unsustainable growth) that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in doing deep, slow, intentional work.” for sure for my next futures presentation. Thank you! Keep writing and sharing!