Our kids have incredible imaginations. They can lose themselves in new worlds regularly, making up names for new creatures which roam our meadow or fly through the air. It’s wonderful to watch them holding imaginary things as they run around.

And then bedtime comes and these creatures need places to sleep, pillows and blankets. But when the lights go out, the room fills up with scary creatures too. Scary creatures created by the same vivid imagination that spent the day in worlds we will never see. And so, the scary creatures are equally as real.

As we grow older, our imagination ages too. Interestingly, the positive, happy, exciting imagination that goes first, while our ability to imagine scary things remains. As adults we rarely lose ourselves in creating new worlds of creatures in the afternoon sun, but scary things abound in that dark laneway just there.

We see this in change processes all the time. Things are imagined and most often they are the potentially scary parts. We need to work together on seeing the new world together. Without it, scary wins every time.

Imagination is powerful. It’s a practice we need to do daily.

Photo by Ümit Yıldırım