Imagining a Full Life

And how my phone is getting in the way

I used to find writing easier. Not just this long form but journaling or even witty facebook status’. My brain was in writing mode all the time.

I have a theory.

The last few days I have been laying in bed in the morning thinking about a series of posts I am working on writing. I have written whole paragraphs and sections in my brain while lying there in that space between fully awake and wanting to go back to sleep. I am seriously brilliant in that space. As soon as I get to the fully awake stage my body automatically reaches for my phone to find out what the New York Times wants to tell me this morning followed by its daily games. (I would be embarrassed to admit this if not for the fact that I know this is how most people start their days.) Immediately squashing the creativity the good nights sleep and my morning musings had given me.

Today I resisted that urge to grab my phone and let my imagination flow through a variety of ideas. And one of those flows took me through some thoughts on imagination.

My first conversation about imagination came when after telling a friend how we have come to realize we raised our son with an expectation he would go to college but with no sense of what he would do once he got there. She made the comment that he couldn’t imagine college. I had never thought of it that way. That in order to go forward to the next stage of life we need to be able to imagine in on some level.

I went to college for one semester before marrying John. I then took night classes for a few years before starting a family.  I never circled back to another class after that. I had wanted to but I just never could imagine how it would work. We could imagine a life where we raised a family without a college degree, a life where we were self employed, a life where I was a homemaker. John’s parents also didn’t go to college and his dad was self employed making that easier to imagine. And so that is the life we pursued. As a result we had very limited college experiences and never really talked about them with our son. Just “go to college”.  We wanted more for him even if we didn’t know what it would look like when he got there.

All our friends went to college and we ask lots of questions so by the time John was 40 and we had more life experience we were able to imagine what college was about and a world where John was in school. We didn’t imagine all the details but enough to take the plunge and figure things out along the way. Our son married and joined the army when John was in school but our daughter watched her dad navigate classes, study and work. She heard us discuss history and psychology and APA formatting and nursing ethics and more. We visited the campus to have lunch with him. Her ability to imagine what college would be like and what she would do there has been particularly easy because it isn’t based on stories but based upon her own observations of college life.

His 2 very proud girls.

Without imagination it is hard to comprehend a life outside our own, a world beyond our front door, a future different than the one we have now or our parents had. So imagination is something we really need to tend to. And as I have started writing again it has become really apparent how much I neglect my imagination spaces. Fill up my mind with noise to the point where there isn’t space for contemplating and processing or conversation. No room to consider changes. I consume a lot of content but without the space to imagine, to process, discuss and understand it all, what have I really accomplished but to be a puppet for other writers.

John and I used to go out every Thursday night during his early years in school and often ended up discussing what he was learning in classes. History classes were our favorite and in a different life I think he might have been a history major. It is one thing to learn about how Genghis Kahn influenced so much of the today’s culture or how close China lost its status as the center of the world but then to discuss it, to make observations about what it has meant for us and how we can reflect on those stories and connect them to our own personal lives. That is when real learning and growth happens. That is when history and the world we live in becomes fascinating and not just a bunch of dates and places to memorize. That’s done in our imaginations.

There is a lot online about our consumption of social media these days. I get a newsletter from a writer who left social media a few years ago and thinks it is the best thing ever. She mentions it frequently. It is a fascinating idea I experimented with this summer when I took social media off my phone. I wasn’t banning myself from it just making it harder to consume and therefore I spent a significantly smaller part of my summer scrolling or documenting my life for others. Instead, I was present and just enjoyed moments.

I also started this substack this summer. Being off social media freed up space in my mind to imagine I could write again and time to actually sit down and do it. (Nobody wants to admit how many hours they spend doom scrolling but let’s just say I had a lot more time to do things this summer.) Don’t get me wrong, I found dozens of additional ways to waste time on my phone, but in between I discovered how much I have missed letting my mind wander. My imagination has taken me on adventures to new places, starting new ventures, meeting new people, trying new things, I have been able to discover parts of me forgotten.

I don’t know what the future of social media is for me. I loved what it was in the beginning when I was still out living life and it was a fun place to make observations about my days to share with friends and read their observations of their days. Now I honestly see the feeds of more people I have never met, pretend friends who share their lives on social media to entertain me each day. (And my sister who is a pretend influencer to all her private friends.) I am honestly not sure why I should return to it. I did put Instagram back on my phone so I could post about this substack (you can’t post a story from a laptop. random trivia), and I am unsure how I like it. What I do know is that I am enjoying more time imagining.

One area of imagination I was unexpectedly introduced to was as a way of studying the bible. Imagination can sound like “make stuff up” and since my faith is based on concrete truths introducing imagination into faith sounds sort of scary and not a good thing. But, I’ve come to understand imagination is exactly what we use to comprehend those concrete truths and discover who God created us to be. People writing in faith spaces are using their imaginations not to make up rules or stories but to help us create a picture in our minds of how those concrete biblical truths written hundreds of years ago can look in our every day lives today. I’m not sure I am a person writing in a faith space or even if that is the goal I have in this season of my life. But I know that even when I don’t mention my faith it is part of all my writing because it is part of me. And so as a woman created in God’s image, a God full of imagination and creativity, I am excited to spend a little more time embracing my imagination and sharing some of it here with you.

---

Random:

I am obsessed with our robot vacuums. We got one for Christmas a couple years ago and would run it at night while we slept. It was a bit of a learning curve to discover all the things that had to get out of the way and all the places it might get stuck but eventually we mastered the system and “Buddy” would leave my main floor looking fresh before finding his way home each night. Buddy did not enjoy all the construction dust and debris associated with redoing our main floor and so he died. Sad. Initially I wasn’t sure I was going to replace him, maybe I could just take care of it myself. How hard can it be? Sometimes you have to be without to know how much you love something.

Last week I bought not 1 but 2 new robot vacuums. If you don’t get fancy they are surprisingly affordable. Having put LVT in our bedroom I have discovered just how much dust gathers, it is impressive, and I am looking under my bed as I walk up the stairs. I was never going to stay on top of that. So we now have Buddy the second for our main floor and Boris for the bedrooms. And they are the greatest things ever to come to homemaking.