Imaginary Friends

There's a little bit of evidence that adults who are novelists or musicians, for example, tend to remember the imaginary friends they had when they were children. It's as if they are staying in touch with those childhood abilities in a way that most of us don't. Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults.

Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby

Envisioning Success.. or Failure

There's evidence our brains mix together real imagery with mental and emotional baggage that effect performance. Slugger Mickey Mantle is reported to have once said after hitting a long home run, "I just saw the ball as big as a grapefruit." In contrast, poor hitters may see the baseball as small. It’s not just out of reach for them physically but emotionally as well.

A Purdue University study tested the kicking ability of more than 20 athletes who do not play football. They were asked to estimate the size of the goal posts before and after each of 10 attempts to kick a field goal. The more successful the athlete, the more likely they were to overestimate the size of the posts and underestimate the distance.

Success biased the kickers’ perception of the difficulty of their task. Professor Jessica Witt says, “Before you kicked, you really didn’t know what your abilities were going to be.’’ In past experiments, she found the same effect with softball players and golfers. University of Virginia psychologist Dennis Proffitt has put together tests that show the effect holds true when it comes to dangerous situations.

Which are you imagining in your life--success or failure?

Stephen Goforth

Imagineering

A child responds to the game of kissing away a hurt or throwing away a fear. This simple process works for the child because in his mind he believes that that is actually the end of it. The dramatic act is a fact for him and so it proves to be the end of the matter.

Imagination is a source of fear, but imagination may also be the cure of fear. “Imagineering” is the use of mental images to build factual results, and it is an astonishingly effective procedure. Visualize your fears being drained out of your mind and the visualization will in due course be actualized. Imagine yourself as reaching into your mind and one by one removing your worries.

However, it is not enough to empty the mind, for the mind will not long remain empty. It must be occupied by something. It cannot continue in a stat of vacuum. Therefore, upon emptying the mind, practice refilling it. Fill it with thought of faith, hope, courage, expectancy.

A half-dozen times each day crowd your mind with such thoughts as those until the mind is overflowing with them. In due course these thoughts of faith will crowd out worry. Day by day, as you fill your mind with faith, there will ultimately be no room left for fear.

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

did you feed the bears?

A phone conversation with a four-year-old:

Did you feed the bears?

      What bears?

The bears under your bed.

      There aren’t any bears under my bed.

Oh, yes, their names are Teddy and Charlie. Teddy Bear and Charlie Bear.

      I’m going to go check.

      (a moment passes)

      There are no bears under my bed.

They must have gone to the bathroom.

      I’ll go see.

Don’t do that, they’d be embarrassed if you saw them.

      (a few more moments of discussion)

      I’m going to see if the bears are in the bathroom.

      (phone is dropped)

      The bears are in the tub. They’re taking a bath!

Life is filled with such interesting and remarkable things when you are four. The further we get away from that imaginative, amazing world, the harder it is to hear the voice of God in our lives and see his hand at work in the world around us. Hang on to the joy of a child.

Stephen Goforth