Читать книгу LifeLines - Malcolm Doney - Страница 14

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Imagine it

Human beings are makers. We invent stuff: tools, machines, meals, stories, art, ideas, religions, cultures, mischief. Our capacity to create came in a ‘cognitive revolution’ around 70,000 years ago, according to the historian Yuval Noah Harari.¹ That’s when Homo sapiens’ capacity to create took off. And creation is one of the things that marks us out.

The engine of making is the imagination. And the fuel of that engine is a question. What if? A question that sends us way beyond straightforward invention.

What if I were you? In order for us to understand one another, we each need to imagine what it’s like to be the other. Otherwise we do one another harm, trample over each others’ feelings. To hurt someone else deliberately is a failure of the imagination. When we cry at weddings, view movies, watch our children play, we are imagining life through someone else’s eyes.

Wouldn’t it work better if? It takes imagination to plan anything: to develop a road system; to make a garden; to choose a school for our kids; to decide how much garlic to add to the casserole. To think ahead.

Couldn’t we possibly? Crucially, our ability to hope is embedded in the imagination. Anne Frank, Nelson Mandela, Rachel Carson, Harvey Milk and Malala Yousafzai envisioned a different, better world. Unless we can imagine that there is more than this, we’re stuck in despair.

Is there more to life? Faith and belief are rarely built on certainties. They’re based on imagination. For instance, thinking that there might be a God (or not), and trying to work out what that God might be like. That’s why believers and doubters use metaphors for the divine: a parent, a despot, a shepherd, a friend. God is by definition beyond definition, so even in our understanding of the sacred, there’s an element of invention.

What would happen if? Imagination opens us up to infinite possibilities, and leads to action.

Imagine it...

What would happen if you asked?

What would happen if you kissed him?

What would happen if you stopped it?

What would happen if you said goodbye?

What would happen if you... added some anchovy?