Posts tagged “Feelings

Imagination

 imagine maik_sv
“I just can’t imagine …”

 

That, my friends, is the problem.  We don’t imagine, and when we don’t imagine, we don’t do.  Imagining and imagination are a critical first step to change.  Imagination is what enables us to make something that is foreign or non-existent relevant in our lives.  It is through imagination that we are able to “see” what is possible and in internalizing possibilities, we make new things happen, both in ourselves and in others.

 

I won’t do the obvious.  That is, I’m not going to quote that song by John Lennon.  (And BTW, I don’t think all the things he wanted us to imagine would be necessarily a good thing.) But I do think he hit on something that many great people have in common. And I’m talking about everyday great people, not just the famous ones. They have an imagination.  In fact, I suspect that it might even be impossible to do great things, unless one submits, indulges or engages the imagination.

 

I was reminded of the power of imagination at a recent lecture on hypnotherapy.  (My wife is a therapist and this was part of her continuing education classes.) The instructors had studied under Milton Erickson, considered one of the godfathers of medical hypnosis and therapy. They noted that hypnosis is typically used in therapy is to help someone change some behavioral challenge, often an addiction, disorder of fear.

 

They noted that the reason hypnosis can promote behavior in individuals lies in the simple fact that “imagination is more powerful than will.”  In many respects, that is what hypnotherapy is all about: enabling people to imagine themselves or others differently.

 

People set goals. They muster will power.  They make resolutions.  They join support groups. They feel they can “muscle” their way through.  But then they find they can’t.  Why?

 

Because despite all of our willpower (or lack thereof), somewhere deep in our subconscious we are not able to muster up the idea that we can actually do things like quitting smoking or over-eating or easing anxiety.  Too often we lack the idea of the possible.  We lack the ability to truly imagine and believe that life could be other than what it is.  And so we end up back in the life they’ve learned to expect for ourselves.

 

Great things, great accomplishments, require imagining they can be. It is not just thinking big.  It is the ability to see, and see clearly, a different path. I believe that was what Rev. Martin Luther King, meant when he said he had a dream. Because in imagining and dreaming he was able to take those first steps to change.

 

But let’s not just use our imagination to simply help ourselves accomplish the things willpower can’t.

 

Let’s help others imagine those things that willpower alone won’t allow them to do.

 

Imagination can be contagious.  And liberating.  And when it spreads, everyone is better for it.

 

 

Imagine via flickr under cc 2.0

I feel just fine … how about you? And the future of journalism.

“Communications is technology.”

Or something like that.

feelingsThat’s what my daughter said excitedly as she told me about her new english major courses at George Mason University.  The excitement in her voice and the enthusiasm in her eyes made her impromptu presentation contagious.

She took me to the creation of Jonathan Harris and Sep Kanvar.

It is a site called We Feel Fine.

Check it out.  I don’t know if it is the future of communications and literature.  But it is certainly fascinating.  It is literature, research, ethnography, technology, emotions, and crowd-sourced literature all rolled into one.

According to the site:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

And so with that, I’ll say this, hoping that at some point some of these nuggets are harvested by the We Feel Fine site and that my contribution adds to someone’s day and another person’s science.

I feel good.  At least today I feel that way.  There have been many days in the past when I’ve felt bad.  Perhaps even miserable.  But today’s a good one.  So far.  You never know.  I could be feeling crummy this afternoon.  Something crazy could happen.  I could remember something stupid and start feeling blue.  Feelings are that way.  Very capricious things those feelings are.  But right now, I feel good.  And the fact that I’m feeling good, feels good.

Have a nice day.