Seeing Outside the Box
"Imagination has to be practiced," Episcopal priest and theologian
Michael Battle said on the New Morning show on being "
Outside the Box."
I agree, but I think imagination is also a quality that many people
either take for granted or assume is a gift that they must have
naturally and can't develop. "I'm not very artistic," they say. Today's show gave us several examples of people who might not
have thought they were capable of doing something artistic, creative,
or outside their comfort zone (one way to define outside the box), and
found they were: carpenters writing poetry, Mary painting doors, the
three mothers singing in concerts.
The segment that really made the point that imagination can be developed with practice was
Sandra Regalado's exercise
on the streets of New York. She took ordinary objects—a glass vase, a
lampshade, a piece of foam, bubble wrap—and asked people to tell her
what it was and what else, besides the obvious use, would they do with
it.
I loved this and wanted to go out in my neighborhood and
repeat it just to remind myself how imaginative people can be. This
would be a great exercise for a youth group to do in their town. And
the adults they interviewed would probably get a big kick out of it,
too!
Let me share a "pop vision"—the sequences of images—that came
to me as I watched this segment. First, I loved it near the end when a
guy told Sandra that a piece of bubble wrap would make a good carpet. I
could see that. They laid the bubble wrap down on the street and
declared it would make a good "red carpet."
We get a lot of bubble wrap in the packages of books that come
to us for review, so I saw us opening the mail and laying down a red
carpet of bubblewrap from our door. Then on screen, somebody walked
down the bubble wrap carpet and the bubbles popped. What a grand
entrance that would make. I thought, "Wow. I would never have thought
of that. From the very ordinary comes this extraordinary moment!" I saw paparazzi flashes going and the crowd gathering in, and
I'm walking down the bubble wrap into the rest of my life, and people
are clapping and cheering, and I'm just beaming.
And then the crowning vision came to me. I remembered the
saying from the Talmud that when a human being walks down the street, a
whole host of angels precedes him or her saying, "Make way, make way
for the image of God." There they are, just ahead of us, if we see outside the box.