Essay 8: When Imagination Enters the Dance

In the previous essay, I wondered what happens when curiosity turns toward its own movement. Even the wish to become quieter or clearer could acquire a future form, giving us another destination to move toward.

Another question remained.

What changes once we begin imagining that destination?

We picture something that has not happened. The picture influences our attention, gives direction to effort, and makes certain choices feel necessary. Through those choices, it begins entering the circumstances from which the future will emerge.

A prediction about our life may already be influencing the life it tries to describe.

This becomes especially clear in writing.

We may begin an essay with a sense of what it will say. There is a thought, perhaps an ending, perhaps only the feeling that something needs to be explored. We imagine the finished work before we know how to write it.

That imagined essay brings us to the page.

Then the writing begins.

One sentence reveals a difficulty we had not noticed. An example opens another question. A word that seemed adequate begins to feel imprecise. We return to the original thought and discover that we no longer understand it in quite the same way.

The work changes through being written.

Our understanding changes with it.

Eventually, the essay may arrive somewhere we could not have pictured at the beginning. The original thought remains within it, but its meaning has developed through the questions encountered along the way.

The imagined essay helped make this possible.

It gave us a reason to begin a process whose outcome it could only partly contain.

Perhaps some parts of life unfold like this.

We imagine a profession, a place to live, a person we might become. The image gathers our efforts around a possibility. We study, make decisions, enter unfamiliar situations, and meet people whose lives reveal things we had never considered.

Along the way, what we want can change.

A kind of work we once admired becomes less compelling as we understand its daily demands. An opportunity we barely noticed begins to matter. A place we hoped would give us belonging helps us recognise more clearly what belonging means to us.

The person approaching the imagined future has changed through approaching it.

This is easy to overlook when we picture our lives years ahead. We imagine different circumstances while carrying many of our present wishes into them. Even the older person in the picture may still be asking for what we want today.

Yet living will continue working upon that person.

Certain desires will weaken. Others will become clearer. We may reach something we hoped for and discover that our relationship with it has changed.

The arrival is real.

So is the distance between the person who imagined it and the person who has arrived.

Expectation can also help produce something much closer to its own picture.

Suppose we expect a conversation to go badly.

Before meeting the other person, we rehearse their possible objections. We prepare our defence. A sentence that has never been spoken begins producing irritation.

When the conversation starts, we arrive carrying that preparation.

A pause feels dismissive. An uncertain expression appears hostile. We answer more sharply than we otherwise might have, and the other person becomes guarded in response.

Later, we may feel that we knew how the conversation would go.

Some of what we anticipated may have entered through us.

The other person’s intentions and circumstances remain their own. But our expectation prepared one of the participants, and that preparation became part of the encounter.

Imagination can give us the patience to prepare for something we desire. It can also narrow our attention until we miss something that would have changed our understanding.

Its effects depend upon the actions it encourages and the circumstances those actions encounter.

Other people make decisions. Opportunities appear and disappear. Chance, illness, loss, and unexpected help alter what becomes possible. Our plans meet conditions we did not create and cannot fully anticipate.

Recognising the influence of imagination gives us something to observe within our participation. The larger outcome remains uncertain.

This brings me back to the earlier thought about form.

An imagined future gives form to possibility.

For a while, that form can help us move. It holds together our intentions and gives effort a direction. Gradually, we may begin asking life to preserve the particular arrangement through which we first understood what we wanted.

A particular place.

A particular sequence.

A particular version of ourselves.

As circumstances change, we keep measuring them against that arrangement. Something worthwhile may be emerging, yet we struggle to recognise it because it does not resemble the picture that brought us here.

A hope can also be frustrated. An opportunity can be lost. We need time to understand what has happened and what it means for us.

Sometimes that understanding includes recognising how much our picture has left out. The activity it encouraged has revealed more than we knew at the beginning. The image may need to change so that it can continue guiding us.

Imagination, too, can learn through Time.

The image of the dance helps me see this relationship.

A dancer anticipates a movement. That anticipation prepares the body. The gesture then takes place among changing conditions: balance, rhythm, space, the presence of other dancers.

Each step alters the position from which the next step becomes possible.

We can prepare for the movement and remain attentive as it happens. Preparation gives us something to work with. Attention allows us to respond to what becomes visible through moving.

There may be a similar possibility in how we carry an imagined future.

We can notice which choices the image makes urgent, which possibilities it brings into view, and which it makes difficult to see. Anticipation itself becomes available to observation.

A plan can remain open to what we learn through following it. A hope can give direction while leaving room for another person’s life. An image can gradually acquire a different shape.

Within the dance, imagination is already a gesture.

Before the essay is written, it has brought us to the page. Through writing, the thought develops, and we begin to see what the first picture could not hold.

Something similar may happen when we move toward a life we have imagined.

The future has not arrived, but our participation has begun.

What we eventually meet may bear the influence of how we lived while imagining it.