“We cannot create what we can’t imagine.” ~ Lucille Clifton
Writing a new year’s post on January 6 seems fitting this year, as I’m easing into 2025 rather than running headlong into it.
I would normally be writing about my guiding word of the year (it’s “rooted”), but honestly, my 2024 word didn’t stick at all, to the point I needed to refer back to last year’s early January blog post to remember what it even was (“expansive” that kept autocorrecting to “expensive” — both were true)!
But here’s something that did stick throughout last year and still has strong currency for me in 2025: we need to imagine our way into the future. We don’t need individual New Year’s resolutions as much as we need collective imagination. People don’t have the stamina to rely on willpower — instead, we need to be energized by possibility.
I treated myself to a book of Mary Oliver poems just before the holidays. I’m savouring it slowly. This line from one of her early poems, The World I Live In, has stuck with me:
You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
ever, possibly, see one.
Imagination does not have to involve angels, or rainbows and unicorns. It can actually be quite practical or even mundane. But whatever our ‘angels’ might be, we need to see them in our head before we’ll see them in the world.
And don’t be discouraged — just practice. Imagination is a skill we develop — a habit that is hard to master — and the required muscles are long-atrophied in most adults.
May stretching and strengthening them be added to our fitness goals for 2025…