Daydreaming

Daydreaming gets a bad rap.  I'm thinking of a kid in school staring glazy-eyed out of the window, and how so many parents and teachers and leaders see in this picture only inattention.  I'm thinking of time spent on the porch on a spring afternoon, dreaming of what you could do, not what you should be doing, and how so many busybodies would interpret this as laziness or a poor use of time.  And I'm thinking of my own life, and all the little moments I take in any given day to imagine myself doing some of the things I've always wanted to do, and ignoring so much of what I have to do instead.

I think daydreaming gets a bad rap because it isn't productive; or at least, not in the sense of accomplishing physical labor.  But can daydreaming really be all that bad?  Like anything in life it's about balance.  If you spent your whole day staring into space dreaming, you would actually have wasted a whole day.  But even then, so what?  Some days are perfect for wasting.  The point is, you can't daydream your life away, but if you never daydream it's going to be a less fulfilling life anyway.

It's my personal opinion that God likes daydreaming.  It's my personal opinion that this is why he made us able to do it.  Our imaginations are amazing.  In many ways our minds - the ways they work, their capacities for problem solving and memory, and so on - are a direct reflection of how we were made "in God's image."  God is creative, intelligent, analytical, imaginative, and yes, a daydreamer.  Would He have made us capable of daydreaming if He didn't have some capacity for it already?  I think the answer is no.

But here is what we demand of ourselves: realism.  We can stomach a little idealism now and again, but realism is much more important.  Hard work.  Bootstraps.  Energy.  Rational thinking.  And realism.  We can stomach a good deed now and again, or a highfalutin motive, but don't think for a minute that we will put up with daydreaming.

What is funny is that so much of who we become is borne out of daydreaming, even if we don't realize it.  You see, you have a hard time becoming something if you never pictured yourself becoming it.  When you picture yourself doing something specific - like scaling a particular peak, walking across the stage at graduation, opening your own business -  it crystalizes inside of you: in your will, in your mind, in your emotions.  In your soul.  Daydreaming will not be all that it takes to get where you want to go, oh no.  You'll have to deal with all of that realism too.  But daydreaming will be your first step.  If you don't imagine what you could become, how will you know what you want to become?