I’ll tell you something - our brains are amazing. Awesome. Complex. Mysterious. Now, I’m not always happy about that. It can get messy, and overwhelming - especially when I don’t take the time to let it catch up with itself.
But in this season of slowing down, I am more aware than ever that the brain is amazing. Especially when I give it enough time and space to dream.
If you have been following the last few posts, you’ll have noticed that I have been sharing my learnings and insights from this period of forced slowing down. Well, I say forced, but to be honest it has absolutely been a deliberate choice on my part to see it as an opportunity to slow down rather than run faster.
The opportunities to speed up have been manifold. There are more resources, online courses, videos, podcasts, articles available than ever before. There are multiple ways of using the time to rewrite a business plan, develop new products, engage in professional development, connect with clients. And I have found it really valuable to engage in all of those to some extent.
But the more I chose to see this season as an invitation to slow down, the more I discover the rich benefits, the new possibilities, the creative opportunities which I would otherwise have missed. And the more I notice my brain firing up in innovative, connective, generative ways which it doesn’t often get to do.
In this season of slowing down, I have had space to imagine what could be. I have had space to dream.
This is not a new experience for me. Imagination and dreaming used to come very naturally to me indeed. Particularly conducive environments for imagination and dreaming in the past have included:
Year 11 Maths class
The requisite 128 bar rests which all 3rd trombone players must endure in youth orchestras
Long car journeys
Taking a shower
European history lectures at university given by tired lecturers reading out their notes line by line off the page…
But what I notice is this…
As a child, and as a young adult, I had more space and time to dream. I had more opportunity to imagine what could be.
I was a lot less busy. And I was bored more often.
In normal adult life, only car journeys and showers remain, and it’s very easy to listen to the radio in either setting should boredom threaten to draw near.
I can think of two concrete examples in the past decade where I have, through different circumstances, had the space and time to imagine, and to dream. Both were catalysed by a measure of necessity, discomfort, or minor crisis. Neither came about because of intentional planning on my part.
Some years ago we bought our first house. We bought a charming farmhouse with a wonderful backstory in the rolling hills of North East Tasmania. It was a great setting. And they say location is everything. ‘They’ say quite a lot things actually, and on this occasion I think the phrase ‘renovators delight’ may well have been uttered. Renovators delight it may have been. Busy-working-parents-with-young-children-who-struggle-to-renovate-burnt-toast’s delight it wasn’t.
By the time we had got a few builders to give us some quotes (not to mention an architect who proposed adding an upstairs floor) we reached the conclusion that this renovators delight was not going to become a future-proof family house without us spending three or four times more money than the house would ever be worth.
Our plan had run out of steam. We had run out of options. We were forced to stop and reassess. And to dream, and to imagine.
Over the next year or so, we imagined and we dreamed, and we ended up purchasing a house where we could live as a family, extend generous hospitality to others, and create a space where others could come and spend time, receive coaching and input and encouragement, and leave refreshed and renewed and re-envisioned. It’s a wonderful place to rest and to call home, and we have thoroughly enjoyed having to slow down and spend more time in it again over these last few months. And yet it is sobering to reflect that we wouldn’t be living here, if our best plans and ideas had come to fruition.
The second concrete example of having space to dream and imagine was more recent. Over the last few years I had been able to reduce my full-time job as an Anglican minister to a part-time job in order to make space for lifeincolour - my business coaching and training leaders. My plan had been simply to do both jobs part-time. I hadn’t counted on the coaching business, nor my enthusiasm and passion for it, growing as it did.
Last September I had to take a couple of weeks of accrued time off from my main job to prevent my leave building up any further. I decided to use the time to ‘experiment’ with only having one job - my coaching business. I connected with advisers and previous clients. I read books, went on long walks and sat with a notebook and a pen by the river - thinking, imagining, dreaming about what could be. I continued to deliver my coaching to all my existing clients, without needing to switch hats and engage with my other role the same afternoon.
Those two weeks were such an eye-opener. For the first time I was able to imagine focusing full-time on coaching and training leaders, on doing one thing as well as possible, rather than dividing my time between two different roles. In the busyness of everyday life I had not really contemplated the possibility of making lifeincolour a full-time business, nor of resigning from my other job. But in those two weeks of slowing down, and experimenting with only having one job, I was able to taste, and see, and imagine. I had the space to dream. And once again, on reflection, it is unlikely I would have ended up where I am now, without that space.
In both of these examples, which led to significant decisions about property purchases, and career decisions, I was somehow forced to slow down, to re-imagine and to dream.
Looking back, I am deeply satisfied with the outcomes of both of these decisions. And yet even now, I realise how rarely the environment in which those decisions were made - one of time, and space, of imagining and dreaming - actually comes about.
Which brings us back to the here and now, and to the generative, connective, and innovative activity our brains are capable of when the necessary conditions for imagining and dreaming are present.
In these last couple of months, as I have deliberately chosen to grasp the opportunity to slow down, I have again had space and time to imagine and to dream.
New chapters of the story are emerging. New layers of paint are being added to the picture. More of the shape and the texture of this new season are becoming clearer.
It is so good to slow down and to be bored. To imagine and to dream.
Who knows where it might lead?
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