Take use of your imaginative powers

It was a small ad in a catalog for an electric flossing machine. “I don’t have the time or energy to floss,” the man in the ad declared. “That’s why I need this machine to do it for me.” Too busy and too tired? Some of us complain about all the things we have to do to maintain spiritual health. Prayer. Meditation. Attending support groups. All these things take time and energy, even though we get a good return on the time we invest. Now, we’re considering adding another activity to our already full self-care activities list: spending time and energy visualizing to help create positive events in our lives. When someone first suggested I use visualization as a tool, my reaction was similar to one of the man in the ad. I don’t have the time. I’m too busy and tired. But we’re always thinking about something and creating pictures in our minds. Usually what we see are worst-case scenarios. So why not take the time, effort, and energy we’re already using to see things not working out and instead visualize things working out? If we’ve got enough time and energy to see the negative what-ifs, we’ve got the time and energy to visualize positive events, too. Visualizing isn’t a form of control. Just because we see things working out well doesn’t guarantee that they will. But if we can see it, it’s more likely to happen than if we can’t see it at all.

New York, 10.26.2023