Cosmologies Are a Source of Identity and Orientation to the World

Identity and orientation.

Deliberately recalling episodes from your life, and evaluating them in terms of gratitude, is a kind of imagination.

Stories.

From stories we gain our identities. The stories we tell ourselves control how we see, know, understand. They orient us. Help us interpret our experiences. Teach us gratitude.

Many words from others in this post today; few from me.

Here are some to start.

Relative to these other groups, the gratitude groups reported being more alert, enthusiastic, determined, attentive, and to have higher energy. They were also more likely to help someone else or provide emotional support. They experienced physical benefits, too, such as longer and better sleep, and engaged in more exercise. Friends and family of people who practice gratitude report that they seem happier, more pleasant, outgoing, trustworthy, and optimistic--it's also better for your health.

What does gratitude have to do with imagination? Well, deliberately recalling episodes from your life, and evaluating them in terms of gratitude, is a kind of imagination. . . . 

Those are from the book Imagination. More on it to follow.

But first, more on how to live with an orientation of gratitude. From the book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. To get there, I'll start with my review:

Kimmerer has the scientific training--rational, evidence-based, data-driven--of a botanist; the indigenous culture, worldview, and beliefs of a Potawatomi Anishinaabe; and the language, spirit, and skill of a poet. In this book she wonderfully melds those three ways of seeing, of knowing, of understanding and communicating. She beautifully shares an ecological message of the possibility of harmonious co-existence with plants and nature, a perspective deeply supported by science. More than any other book I know, it spoke equally to my head, my heart, and my soul.

If there's a single concept at the core of the book, it's reciprocity. Take care of the things that take care of you. Plants and nature are not consumable resources to be plundered and used up; they are equal beings sharing space--sharing the planet--with us, deserving of respect and care. We need to learn gratitude for the gifts they provide us, to listen to them, and to see to their health the way they see to ours.

The book is a collection of essays, a moment or experience from Kimmerer's life the heart of each one, surrounded by ruminations on the indigenous perspective informing it, the science involved, and her ruminations.

In "Wisgaak Gokpenagen: A Black Ash Basket," she reflects on her experience learning to make traditional baskets from black ash trees, including a study she helped one of her graduate students conduct investigating a decline in the population of the trees. Because new shoots need a certain amount of space and sunlight to achieve a healthy height, they found the trees didn't reproduce optimally when left entirely alone; new growth emerged best in areas where storms or disease had culled some of the older growth. The healthiest, most replenished populations of black ash were the ones near basket makers, who selectively harvested a carefully spaced, dispersed portion of the trees. The science showed the wisdom of the traditional practices.

Black ash and basket makers are partners in a symbiosis between harvesters and harvested: ash relies on people as the people rely on ash. Their fates are linked.

Similarly, in "Mishkos Kenmawen: The Teachings of Grass," Kimmerer tells of how she helped a different graduate student conduct studies of sweetgrass to show the traditional methods of harvesting are healthiest for the grass. Unharvested plots of sweetgrass struggled to survive, where the plots that were thinned by harvesting allowed what remained to grow, spread, and thrive.

Our elders taught that the relationship between plants and humans must be one of balance. People can take too much and exceed the capacity of the plants to share again. That's the voice of hard experience that resonates in the teachings of "never take more than half." And yet, they also teach that we can take too little. If we allow traditions to die, relationships to fade, the land will suffer. These laws are the product of hard experience, of past mistakes. And not all plants are the same; each has its own way of regenerating. Some, unlike sweetgrass, are easily harmed by harvest. Lena would say that the key is to know them well enough to respect the difference.

It's about seeing ourselves not as dominant over nature, but in relationship with nature. A relationship characterized by gratitude for the exchange of gifts. Reciprocity.

The guidelines for the Honorable Harvest are not written down, or even consistently spoken of as a whole--they are reinforced in small acts of daily life. But if you were to list them, they might look something like this:

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last.
Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.

That's a central message from the book, though far from the only one. There are stories from Kimmerer's life, history, traditional tales, science, and a much wider variety of topics than the theme of harvest that I have highlighted here. Another, for example:

The diversity of salmon in the river--Chinook, Chum, Pink and Coho--ensured that the people would not go hungry, likewise the forests. Swimming many miles inland, they brought a much-needed resource for the trees: nitrogen. The spent carcasses of spawned-out salmon, dragged into the woods by bears and eagles and people, fertilized the trees as well as Skunk Cabbage. Using stable isotope analysis, scientists traced the source of nitrogen in the wood of ancient forests all the way back to the ocean. Salmon fed everyone.

Reciprocity. In myriad ways, from different perspectives, settings, and scales, this book describes nature as a complex interconnectedness of many different beings, many different forms of life, humans one among many.

I dream of a world guided by a lens of stories rooted in the revelations of science and framed with an Indigenous worldview--stories in which matter and spirit are both given voice.

Kimmerer has certainly accomplished her dream in this book.

Reciprocity. Take care of the things that take care of you.

We need to learn gratitude for the gifts they provide us, to listen to them, and to see to their health the way they see to ours.

A complex interconnectedness of many different beings, many different forms of life, humans one among many.

Ways of seeing, of knowing, of understanding and communicating. Guided by a lens of stories.

Our fates are linked.

Here's a longer section where she talks explicitly about the melding of her perspectives.

So how, then, can science, art, and story give us a new lens to understand the relationship that people made of corn represent? Someone once said that sometimes a fact alone is a poem. Just so, the people of corn are embedded in a beautiful poem, written in the language of chemistry. The first stanza goes like this:

Carbon dioxide plus water combined in the presence of light and chlorophyll in the beautiful membrane-bound machinery of life yields sugar and oxygen.

Photosynthesis, in other words, in which air, light, and water are combined out of nothingness into sweet morsels of sugar--the stuff of redwoods and daffodils and corn. Straw spun to gold, water turned to wine, photosynthesis is the link between the inorganic realm and the living world, making the inanimate live. At the same time it gives us oxygen. Plants give us food and breath.

Here is the second stanza, the same as the first, but recited backward:

Sugar combined with oxygen in the beautiful membrane-bound machinery of life called the mitochondria yields us right back where we began--carbon dioxide and water.

Respiration--the source of energy that lets us farm and dance and speak. The breath of plants gives life to animals and the breath of animals gives life to plants. My breath is your breath, your breath is mine. It's the great poem of give and take, of reciprocity that animates the world. Isn't that a story worth telling? Only when people understand the symbiotic relationships that sustain them can they become people of corn, capable of gratitude and reciprocity.

The very facts of the world are a poem. Light is turned to sugar. Salamanders find their way to ancestral ponds following magnetic lines radiating from the earth. The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke. Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren't these stories we should all know?

Who is it who holds them? In long-ago times, it was the elders who carried them. In the twenty-first century, it is often scientists who first hear them. The stories of buffalo and salamanders belong to the land, but scientists are one of their translators and carry a large responsibility for conveying their stories to the world.

And yet scientists mostly convey these stories in a language that excludes readers. Conventions for efficiency and precision make reading scientific papers very difficult for the rest of the world, and if the truth be known, for us as well. This has serious consequences for public dialogue about the environment and therefore for real democracy, especially the democracy of all species. For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from someplace else.

I think it's fair to say that if the Western world has an ilbal, it is science. Science lets us see the dance of the chromosomes, the leaves of moss, and the farthest galaxy. But is it a sacred lens like the Popul Vuh? Does science allow us to perceive the sacred in the world, or does it bend light in such a way as to obscure it? A lens that brings the material world into focus but blurs the spiritual is the lens of a people made of wood. It is not more data that we need for our transformation to people of corn, but more wisdom.

While science could be a source of and repository for knowledge, the scientific worldview is all too often an enemy of ecological compassion. It is important in thinking about this lens to separate two ideas that are too often synonymous in the mind of the public: the practice of science and the scientific worldview that it feeds. Science is the process of revealing the world through rational inquiry. The practice of doing real science brings the questioner into an unparalleled intimacy with nature fraught with wonder and creativity as we try to comprehend the mysteries of the more-than-human world. Trying to understand the life of another being or another system so unlike our own is often humbling and, for many scientists, is a deeply spiritual pursuit.

Contrasting with this is the scientific worldview, in which a culture uses the process of interpreting science in a cultural context that uses science and technology to reinforce reductionist, materialist economic and political agendas. I maintain that the destructive lens of the people made of wood is not science itself, but the lens of the scientific worldview, the illusion of dominance and control, the separation of knowledge from responsibility.

I dream of a world guided by a lens of stories rooted in the revelations of science and framed with an Indigenous worldview--stories in which matter and spirit are both given voice.

Scientists are particularly good at learning about the lives of other species. The stories they could tell convey the intrinsic values of the lives of other beings, lives every bit as interesting, maybe more so, as those of Homo sapiens. But while scientists are among those who are privy to these other intelligences, many seem to believe that the intelligence they access is only their own. They lack the fundamental ingredient: humility. After the gods experimented with arrogance, they gave the people of corn humility, and it takes humility to learn from other species.

In the Indigenous view, humans are viewed as somewhat lesser beings in the democracy of species. We are referred to as the brothers of Creation, so like younger brothers we must learn from our younger elders. Plants were here first and have had a long time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground and hold the earth in place. Plants know how to make food from light and water. Not only do they feed themselves, but they make enough to sustain the lives of all the rest of us. Plants are providers for the rest of the community and exemplify the virtue of generosity, always offering food. What if Western scientists saw plants as their teachers rather than their subjects? What if they told stories with that lens?

Guided by a lens of stories.

This is from the very first essay in Kimmerer's collection, where she writes of the Skywoman creation myth, compares it to the biblical story of the Garden of Eden and Eve, and creates a foundation for all that follows.

On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.

Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven. . . . 

The Skywoman story, shared by the original peoples throughout the Great Lakes, is a constant star in the constellation of teachings we call the Original Instructions. These are not "instructions" like commandments, though, or rules; rather, they are like a compass: they provide an orientation but not a map. The work of living is creating that map for yourself. How to follow the Original Instructions will be different for each of us and different for every era.

In their time, Skywoman's first people lived by their understanding of the Original Instructions, with ethical prescriptions for respectful hunting, family life, ceremonies that made sense for their world. . . . 

Can we all understand the Skywoman story not as an artifact from the past but as instructions for the future? Can a nation of immigrants once again follow her example to become native, to make a home? . . . 

In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top--the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation--and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn--we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away.

I like to imagine that when Skywoman scattered her handful of seeds across Turtle Island, she was sowing sustenance for the body and also for the mind, emotion, and spirit: she was leaving us teachers. The plants can tell us her story; we need to learn to listen.

Cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness.

Are we to dominate the rest of creation or partner with it? Our stories decide for us.

Now, back to the book I teased at the top, Imagination: The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power by Jim Davies. Once again, I'll start with my review.

Davies presents a wealth fascinating information that reframes the way we think about imagination. Instead of simply make-believe, imagination is part and parcel of how we interact with and think about the world. Everything we perceive and everything we remember involves imagination, as both perception and memory involve a process of taking data and using imagination to "translate" it into what we sense, think, and know. It's an inescapable facet of mental processing that we always add to and invent what we believe has come from outside ourselves and from the past in order to make the data make sense.

For example, if I tell you that I was riding my bike, and I tapped on the window of a car to talk to the driver, you will create a situation model that includes all of these things: I had intended to get the driver's attention. The tapping made a sound. We were both on the road. I didn't mention any of those things. They are brought to bear by your mind as relevant information. And later, you are unlikely to remember what was in the sentences versus what you inferred from them.

That example is related to how we understand language. Another aspect to the equation is how different parts of the brain process information, especially the more automatic, instinctive, "lizard" brain in comparison to the slower, conscious, "thinking" brain. The former believes everything you imagine as lived experiences even as the other part knows it is constructed.

Vividly imagining something happening to you can result in your inability to distinguish it from an actual memory. These imaginings can come from stories told by others, leading questions from police or therapists, guided visualization, hypnosis, or even literature, movies, and television. . . .

Your mental images are not much different from your perceptions.

That our brains work this way is great because it allows us to be who we are, yet it comes with a range of implications. Davies establishes the basic information I've shared in the first part of the book, then spends the remainder exploring those implications and how they can be good, bad, useful, and problematic in different circumstances. How you imagine yourself in the future impacts your likelihood to procrastinate, overeat, and make other choices in the present, for instance. Imagination impacts your emotions, mood, morality, physical well-being, and more. The book includes chapters on hallucinations, dreams, and imaginary companions. It is marvelously wide-ranging.

I found some of the topics more interesting and exciting than others. Some parts I skimmed, some I couldn't stop marking bits to revisit and pull out. Davies' writing could be stronger and it needed another editing to clean up some simple errors. Yet overall this is a commendable and excellent book. It has certainly made me think.

In a very real way, if we want something to be true, we start by imagining it.

In some ways it reminded me of What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund. Of it, I wrote in Backward Phrenology:

Central to Mendelsund's point is that readers participate in co-creating the meaning of everything they read. When we read the word "river," for instance, all meaning attached to the word comes from our own experiences. The sights, sounds, and smells we associate with the word will be the ones we have experienced before. The only rivers we can imagine are those we have already seen, so no matter how precisely the author describes a river, all imagery will come from us as readers. We co-create what we see.

Except, according to Davies, that's how all mental imagery works regardless of the source of perception and including memories. Imagination is part of it all.

Here is more from Davies on his basic ideas:

When we hear someone talking . . . we are using our auditory perception, and when we read text, we are using visual perception, but in these cases the important thing is that we're understanding language, and it's less important whether we got the words through our eyes or our ears. As such, the specifics of the visual and auditory systems fade in importance.

In fact, people often can't remember whether they heard or read something, and have a hard time remembering exactly what words were even said. People remember what's important: the meaning. When a scene is described to you, you create a "situation model" to help you comprehend the sentences. It contains a mixture of what you already know and the meaning of the sentences. The situation model includes all kinds of information: when events happened, how things are spatially organized, the causal relationships between the elements of the situation, and even the goals, attention, and other mental states of the characters. For example, if I tell you that I was riding my bike, and I tapped on the window of a car to talk to the driver, you will create a situation model that includes all of these things: I had intended to get the driver's attention. The tapping made a sound. We were both on the road. I didn't mention any of those things. They are brought to bear by your mind as relevant information. And later, you are unlikely to remember what was in the sentences versus what you inferred from them.

I've always been aware that what I remember is the gist of what I learn much more than the exact words and details; it's the ideas that stick. I thought it was a possible deficiency, but it seems not.

I've always loved the idea of flow--and my experiences of it.

When you read a novel or hear a story, your imagination is active and is, indeed necessary for comprehension. Sometimes we can get so drawn into these stories, recreated in our own imagination, that we stop attending to our actual surroundings. For example, in a particularly exciting part of a book, it might not even enter your mind for several minutes that you're sitting in a chair, at home, or even reading at all. Psychologists call this "transportation," because you feel transported to the world created by the author--or at least, the version of it you are creating in your own mind. . . . 

Transportation is closely linked to the concept of flow . . . which is the good feeling you get when you are completely absorbed in a task and lose track of time, forgetting about other concerns in your life for a while. People can experience flow when creating art, engaging in sports, or numerous other activities. Interestingly, reading creates the flow experience more than any other activity.

Reading flow is one of my particular joys in life.

More about the brain's mixed reactions to imaginary input:

Don't they know it's not real? Do the emotions adults feel mean that they can't distinguish fantasy from reality either?

The answer is kind of yes and kind of no, for both children and adults. The new brain knows full well that imaginary companions and horror movies are depictions of things with no physical reality. But the old brain can't tell the difference. It responds to images of people in movies just like images of real-life people. To an extent, it also responds similarly to our own mental simulations. So in both cases--children and adults--the emotional response people have is not a reliable indicator of people's conscious ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Part of your brain thinks it's real, and part of it knows it's not.

Overall, children's abilities to understand the nature of "pretend" and fantasy is quite impressive. . . . 

What is particularly amazing about it is how they are able to do this when, in our modern world, kids are absolutely inundated with fantasy! From books, to television, to Santa Claus, to their own pretend play, a great deal of what kids pay attention to isn't real at all. Adults even play along, talking to stuffed animals as though they were real or treating a pile of cushions as a house. . . . 

By age five, kids seem to have little trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. Three-year-old children are 75 percent correct when asked to sort things into boxes labeled "real life" and "make-believe." . . . 

Kids' confusion about fantasy and reality are most prevalent when adults are actively trying to deceive them! It is ironic that many of the parents who worry about their children's ability to distinguish fantasy from reality are the very same people who go to extraordinary lengths to convince children of the reality of culturally accepted fantasy characters, such as the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. . . . It seems quite unfair to blame children for the inability to distinguish reality on the basis of cultural fantasies we try so hard to convince them of! We should be more impressed with their ability to figure out the truth in spite of all the fantasy we flood their heads with.

That's why stories are so powerful, because a part of the brain accepts them as lived experiences.

You can affect your own mind by deliberately putting it into different mental states. When you meditate, for example, you can calm yourself down. When you imagine something horrible, you might get yourself upset. As I will discuss later in the book, you can also use imagery for pain reduction and some other medical benefits. In short, thinking about this or that can affect your mind, and your mind can affect your body. Generating positive feelings in yourself, such as gratitude, hope, and forgiveness, can cause increased immune system functioning, lower stress, cardiovascular benefits, reduced risk of stroke, and less depression. Scientifically, this is not controversial.

And one of the best types of stories you can tell yourself is one of gratitude.

Fantasizing about a happy future leads to a short-term boost in happiness, but more depressive symptoms down the road.

So, if thinking about how great your life could be makes you feel worse, can thinking about how bad you life could be make you feel better? Yes. . . . If you think about how your life could be worse, it increases positive feelings, such as surprise, joy, and relief in avoiding disaster. . . . 

Counterfactual thoughts like this often lead to mixed emotions: there are positive emotions resulting from feeling fortunate that the bad things didn't happen to you, paired with anxiety--that could have been me.

You can use your imagination to improve your mood, but you have to be strategic about it. Thinking about how your life could be worse can help you have gratitude about your life as it is. For example, I love being a university professor, and sometimes I think about what my life might be like if I had another job. Any other job. This makes me happy in that it fosters appreciation. But if I think about losing my professor job in the future, or about someone else who lost their job whom I can identify with, it freaks me out and causes anxiety.

Reflecting on what you're grateful for can provide even more benefits than downward counterfactuals. Gratitude is a complex phenomenon involving both beliefs, attention to memories, and emotion. You can think of it as the perception that one has received some benefit because of chance, of the good intentions of another (rather than some benefit earned, deserved, or worked for).

One way to exercise your gratitude muscle is to keep a gratitude journal . . . Relative to these other groups, the gratitude groups reported being more alert, enthusiastic, determined, attentive, and to have higher energy. They were also more likely to help someone else or provide emotional support. They experienced physical benefits, too, such as longer and better sleep, and engaged in more exercise. Friends and family of people who practice gratitude report that they seem happier, more pleasant, outgoing, trustworthy, and optimistic--it's also better for your health.

What does gratitude have to do with imagination? Well, deliberately recalling episodes from your life, and evaluating them in terms of gratitude, is a kind of imagination. . . . 

Gratitude is thinking about your life as it is, but we often use our imagination to think about what might have been. These are things we know to be false, but temporarily suppose to be true. It is a sandbox where we can build an imagined reality and see what happens. It's a simple imagining of a possible world, a world that might be, or might have been.

Gratitude is a complex phenomenon involving both beliefs, attention to memories, and emotion. You can think of it as the perception that one has received some benefit because of chance, of the good intentions of another.

Received benefit because of another. Like plants, for instance. And the natural world.

I've always been a big mind-wanderer. I can disappear into my head more easily and completely than most.

Spontaneous daydreaming is sometimes called "mind-wandering." This often happens when you are bored or doing well-practiced tasks, such as driving, which don't require a great deal of conscious attention. Because your "task at hand" is easy, the mind has processing resources in excess of what's needed. The mind is basically at rest at these times, and to occupy itself it turns to thoughts that are unrelated to the task at hand. People daydream more when stressed, bored, sleepy, or in chaotic environments. They daydream less when enjoying themselves. They might plan for the future, fantasize, or worry about things unrelated to where they are and what they are doing.

In these cases, the metabolic demands of the task at hand turn out to be only a fraction of the metabolic energy consumed by the brain. That is, the thing it looks like someone's doing (say, walking while carrying a box of stuff) is only using a little bit of the brain's resources. This means that a good deal of energy is being used for something other than actively engaging with the external environment. And this is a lot of energy--a full 20 percent of the body's energy is used by the brain, even when the body is at rest. The brain is a mere 2 percent of the body, by weight.

I remember was back in library school, when the Internet was somewhat young, researching the idea of "information overload" and coming across an article that mentioned how brains can experience "information underload" of the type Davies describes above. It resonated. I've definitely experienced my mind wandering more when I try to remain still and physically attentive, and I know that I focus better when fidgeting.

Sometimes being slightly distracted from your current task can help. . . . 

Let's think about what it means to be bored. Humans are curious creatures who like to be occupied with moderately challenging situations. Our minds are hungry for information. When what we are experiencing does not engage us, our minds have unused resources. Think of it as mental energy that is looking to be spent, analogous to when your body is antsy, but you're required to sit still. What does the mind do in this situation? Well, if often engages in mind-wandering. The students who were not allowed to doodle got bored, and then completely disengaged with the lecture, thinking about different things. As a result, they retained very little. Their minds were elsewhere.

But the doodlers had an advantage. One way to think about it is that the lecture didn't satisfy their minds, but the combination of doodling and listening to the lecture did. The sum of the two activities kept them from disengaging completely, and they were able to retain more of the lecture!

I can't focus on audiobooks when sitting still, but need to be driving or hiking or cleaning or similar. I do my best thinking--am most likely to experience a deep, meditative flow--when my body is engaged in a thoughtless activity that allows my mind to wander freely.

Meditation and flow are related to mindfulness, though not entirely the same.

Interestingly, there is a downside to being in the moment--you are more likely to disconnect from your future self. The connection you feel to your future self predicts, in many ways, good behavior in the present: less procrastination, better eating habits, saving money, and so on. Recall that Eve-Marie Blouin-Hudson's experiment found that imagining your future self (which, again, is clearly not engaging in the here and now that's emphasized by mindfulness) resulted in a better connection to your future self than meditation did. The point is that whatever benefits mindfulness confers, it's not always the best mind-set to have. Sometimes using your imagination is good for you.

I found the chapter about imagining the future one of the most fascinating.

Interestingly, people make systematic, predictable errors when imagining the future. Knowing what these errors are can help you not to be misled by your own imagination.

I'm not going to try to capture every one of the errors Davies describes, just a few, like this one.

Your language orients you.

Your connection to your future self is also related to the language you speak. There are strong-future languages that make a clear, often necessary distinction between present and future, like English, Italian, and Korean. Weak-future languages, such as Mandarin, Finnish, and Estonian, draw little contrast. People in weak-future languages save more for retirement, are less likely to smoke, practice safer sex, and exercise more.

The idea that people think of their future selves as different people is also revealed in brain imaging studies. . . . 

If the subconscious metaphors that guide your worldview lead to a disconnect from your future self as someone different, you aren't as inclined to take care of that other, future person with the choices you are making now. If, on the other hand, you feel strongly connected to your future self, you'll find it easier to be kind to that person in the present.

That works for not only preventing bad decisions, but encouraging good ones.

There is evidence to suggest that imagining your goal being fulfilled actually makes it less likely to come true.

Imagining that you have achieved some goal is engaging in fantasy, and one of the characteristics of fantasizing is that it feels good--that's why we do it. Your imaginings feel so real to you that you actually get a bit of the satisfaction you should feel for actually achieving the goal, but you get it just from imagining achieving the goal. Why do fantasies feel good? Because it feels like something good already happened to you, and that's satisfying.

The unfortunate result of this is that you are less likely to do the actions necessary to actually achieve these goals you imagined already having been achieved. Shocking as it seems, imagining your goal being achieved decreases your chances of obtaining it. . . . 

Writing a book is a long, hard process. So what should I be thinking about instead? What should my self-affirmations be? I should be imagining getting up and working on the book every morning. I should imagine working on it even when I don't feel like it, and when I'm stuck, and when I think the book is terrible. I should tell myself that I have what it takes to keep at it through obstacles and difficulty. Evidence shows that visualizing the steps you'd have to do to achieve the goal helps. In Shelley Taylor's study, the students who imagined doing well on an exam got worse grades than those who imagined studying for the exam.

Imagining the steps and the processes you need to undertake to achieve a goal activates some different brain areas than those activate when you imagine the goal being achieved. . . . Imagining goal achievement allows people to experience the positive emotions they'd get too early.

The lesson is to imagine what you should be doing to achieve your goals, rather than fantasizing about them being achieved and hoping the universe will do the work for you.

Imagining goal achievement allows people to experience the positive emotions they'd get too early. Instead of imagining the destination, imagine the journey.

Similarly, like cosmologies, imagination is a source of identity and orientation to the world.

Thinking about good things you've done in a more specific, concrete way (rather than an abstract one), or thinking about good things you've done recently, causes a compensatory behavior. That is, it makes you less likely to do good deeds. But if people think about being good in an abstract way, or about good things done in the past, it reinforces a moral identity and results in people being more likely to act in a good way. So does thinking about being good make you more good? Well, it depends on how you think about being good! If you think about it in the abstract, or about the steps involved with doing good, or about things you've done that were good in the distant past, or about being good as part of your identity, it might help you be a better person. But if you imagine being good vividly, perhaps using mental imagery, or think about good things you've done recently, or focus too much on how great it would feel to do good, you are likely to think you're already "good enough" and choose not to do as many good things.

Imagine yourself as the type of person you want to be in interaction with the world, the positive impact you want to have on others, and the appropriate choices will follow. It's an identity and an orientation.

Finally, as someone who has consciously cultivated imagination in my children--and who encourages it in others professionally--this makes me happy.

Let's look at the kinds of children who are likely to create imaginary companions. . . . 

Various studies on the subject show that these children are more cooperative with adults, engage in more cooperative play, are rated to be less shy by their parents (though other studies have failed to replicate this), are less fearful and anxious about playing with other children, are described as smiling and laughing more than children without imaginary companions, and have better focus (up to age seven, after which the differences disappear).

They are also better at "theory of mind" tasks. This means that they are particularly good at imagining what might be in the minds of others. . . . 

Children who are prone to fantasy (which includes, but is not limited to, having imaginary companions) appear to be more creative than other children . . . 

It seems that pretend play of all kinds is hardwired into human nature. Adults who report that they had imaginary companions are less neurotic, less introverted, more dominant in face-to-face interactions, more self-confident, and more sociable.

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Ultimately, interaction with imaginary companions is a form of play, and like other forms of play, it seems to help children control their emotions. . . . Imaginary companions are often a form of self-therapy. . . . 

Children also use imaginary companions to aid with building skills. . . . 

Children who have imaginary companions watch less television, which is not surprising because many kids report watching TV for the same reasons they play with imaginary companions: it's fun and provides company.

Imagination is good for you.

As I've quoted myself many times previously; originally from Imagination: Not Just for Kids:

And, really, in a very broad sense, isn't this what we're doing when we discuss politics and religion, when we gossip and spread rumors, when we create mission and vision statements for our workplaces, when we try to figure out how to live with one another as neighbors and define ourselves as communities--aren't we really just negotiating the rules of our shared games and trying to find groups to be part of whose styles match our own?  How we define reality is up to all of us to figure out together, and it happens in the interplay between us.

See also: Where Did That Banana Come From?: You Believe in Legends, Fairy Tales, and Myths.

Stories control the world.

Tell yourself good ones.

Our older son, age nine, has always enjoyed listening to audiobooks in the car and has lately been wanting them to fall asleep to each night as well. I had him sample Braiding Sweetgrass and he liked it, so we just started it as his new regular thing. Here's a related Facebook post I wrote about it:

This morning on [Older] and my half-hour drive to drop him off at day camp,* this nine-year-old who still resists reading on his own unless he's really in the mood, said:

"You know how Mom has a dictionary for translating English to French? Can you get me something from the library like that, but for Latin?"

I said I would, then started telling him the library also gives us access to online programs like Rosetta Stone and Mango Languages. He stopped me and said he really just wants a Latin-English dictionary to study.

I think it might have something to do with Braiding Sweetgrass, the audiobook he fell asleep to last night. Maybe. We reflected on the book quite a bit during the earlier part of the drive. For months he's wanted repeat listens of Poison for Breakfast every night, but I started him on this one last night and he says he wants to continue it. So maybe he wants to know more Latin roots for scientific terms, but he didn't really say.

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*Outdoor survival skills camp

I'm hopeful encountering these stories from Kimmerer at his impressionable age will be formative to a worldview that guides him to help make the world a better place.

We've also just started reading together the first volume of Joy Hakim's A History of US series. It seems to provide a really good accounting of U.S. history. Here's a bit from the introduction:

Being an American is a privilege. People all over the world wish that they, too, could be American. Why? Because we are a nation that is trying to be fair to all our citizens. . . . 

No other nation, in the history of the world, has ever provided so much freedom, so much justice, and so much opportunity to so many people. . . . 

The Constitution of the United States was the first written constitution--in all of world history--to attempt to treat each citizen equally. It begins with the words "We the People..." You are part of "the People." . . . 

When you say the Pledge of Allegiance, do you ever think about the meaning of the words with liberty and justice for all?

Liberty is freedom, and you know what that is. But think what it might be like to live in a country where you are not free. In some countries you are told what work you must do and where you must live.

Justice is fairness. Having the same laws for everyone is fair.

The last words in the Pledge of Allegiance are for all. This is a nation that tries to offer opportunity for all. In the United States you are free to do anything that anyone else can do. You can run for president, be an artist, write books, or build houses.

I also shared that on Facebook, and let my sarcastic side out with my introduction to it:

Been reading our kids some crazy, woke propaganda that trans, gay, minority, immigrant, Muslim, and all other types of Americans are equally part of "us" with the same freedoms, privileges, and rights to be themselves that we all enjoy together. Pretty radical, I know.

The far right's campaign to ostracize those who don't fit their mold keeps growing and gaining steam at state and local levels, with "woke" and "trans" being their current two biggest boogeymen.

So this was especially heartening to read:

Illinois Set to Become First State to End Book Bans

Governor JB Pritzker is expected to sign a bill that would make Illinois the first state to legislate to end book bans – by punishing publicly-funded institutions that attempt to censor in that way. . . . 

Only libraries in the state that adhere to the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, which states that reading materials should not be removed or restricted because of partisan or personal disapproval, or develop a written statement prohibiting the practice of banning books within a library system will continue to get its state funding. . . .

“In Illinois, we don’t hide from the truth,” Pritzker said in a statement when the legislation was introduced in March. “We embrace it and lead with it. Banning books is a devastating attempt to erase our history and the authentic history of many.” . . . 

“The concept of banning books contradicts the very essence of what our country stands for,” Giannoulias, who also serves as the state’s official librarian, said in a statement. “It also defies what education is all about: teaching our children to think for themselves.”

Such excellent quotations.

The right-wing campaign is all about telling stories that change our collective consciousness; altering our national cosmologies and related identities. Historian Heather Cox Richardson has been working to counter it with her daily Letters from an American series; working to remind us who we are and where we come from.

Here is part of her letter for Memorial Day this year:

May 29, 2023

Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II . . . 

On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!” . . . 

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.” . . . 

Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” . . . 

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:

First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.” . . . 

“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.” . . . 

The current right-wing campaign is not drawn from the U.S. historical identity, values, and orientation, but Fascist ones.

We need to be telling different stories for our imaginations to believe.

To finish, one more quote from Imagination:

We misunderstand other people a lot. One of the ways we get it wrong is that we reliably underestimate how nice other people are going to be. We like to think of ourselves as good people, but think of everybody else as more selfish.

Other people are nicer and better than we think.

Telling that story repeatedly is the kind of thing that will help create positive-feedback loops that build community and reciprocity.

That's who we want to be.