Vantage points

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

– Albert Einstein

I lived for 50 years in a community devoted to learning and dreaming big in the world of missiles and rockets.  Learning was valued.  Technical imagination was encouraged.  How about non-technical?  Well, we might not be as good at that, necessarily.

Engineers are stereotypically organized, straight-line people.  I once saw an engineer sighting down his row of beanpoles, making sure they were all the same angle and height.  Maybe we’re sometimes too busy making things look alike, to recognize something “outside the lines” as a good thing, not an aberration.

Is your imagination limited by what you see around you?  Limited to what you have already seen?  Limited to who you know?  If so, embrace a different vantage point.  “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places to pray.”  Lonely, desert places of the body and soul can rejuvenate a tired, canalized imagination.  

Leave enough “white space” in your calendar that you can look around and see, and imagine.  Get off alone, regularly.  Change vantage points, physically, environmentally, emotionally.  It’s more important than “doing it all.”  The whole world’s waiting for you.

Tomorrow, the interview with Center of Hope leader Dale Hendry.  “If you fall, it’s just another step to your recovery.”