Imagine

Last year's Buddy Walk

Imagine our cup is overflowing. Imagine his gifts are many. Imagine that limitations belong to all of us. Imagine that we are all already whole, complete, and loved just the way we are.

Last night Mark and I had an interesting conversation about themes in life that seem to hit you upside the head over and over until you start paying more attention to what they might mean and why. One of my lifelong themes seems to be the power of imagination. I know this sounds like a girlish cliche that probably came from Reading Rainbow sometime in the 80s, but usually something is a cliche because it is mostly true. It's when we turn a mind-bending truth into an overused phrase that we cease to pay attention to it, or we mock it, or if you're like me, stick your writerly nose in the air and snort at it. "Ha!" you say, "You won't catch me using that ridiculous phrase in my writing!"

"Ha," indeed. Imagination is powerful.

In primary school I used my imagination to visualize the books I was reading or to craft my own stories, which according to my mother, I was doing from a very early age. I think she may still have a box of them somewhere in her house. In secondary school I used my imagination to visualize all the ways my life, my talents, my body, and my popularity could grow. A fruitless exercise, in the end. In college, I started thinking about the ways imagination could actually transform the real world. I read about it, thought about, heard lectures on it, and wrote about it. When I got to graduate school, the academic conversations about how imagination transforms persisted. This was something real. This was something good. This was even something spiritual.

 I can identify particular points in my life when imagination has either sustained me or entirely failed me.  When the painfully shy twenty-year old me decided to become a teacher, she did so by imagining it was possible for her to stand before a classroom of teenagers without passing out or losing her voice. It worked! After a while, imagination became reality. When deciding whether to add babies to her world, this mama imagined what that world might look like, and liked the look indeed. Eight years later...there's no need to imagine that anymore! When Mark had cancer, I imagined us on the other side of it. That kind of imagination is what we might call faith--imagination that hopes in a future not yet realized.

True confession: Imagination temporarily failed me when our son K was born. I had no material to draw from. I had no experience that was similar. I just couldn't imagine what our lives would be, and I felt lost and scared. Recently, I've been reading and thinking about not just our ability to imagine but our obligation to do so. Of course, we can all spend time imagining what our own lives might be and become. That's easy. But what about imagining the lives of others? Especially when those others don't seem to be much like us.

"I like books that have main characters who are like me," one of my students shared in class last week. "If they're not like me, I have a hard time connecting with the book I'm reading." 

"That's interesting," I replied, "Life can be like that, too. Our experiences can be so different, but sometimes we share more in common than we realize."

In my letter to those same students earlier this summer, I wrote that I hoped we would be able to "appreciate the beauty difference makes." I should have added, "You'll need your imagination for that."

Michael Berube, in his memoir Life As We Know It  about his son Jamie, born in 1991 with Down syndrome, presses readers to assume a communal obligation to “cultivate a capacity to imagine other people…and to imagine our obligations to each other” (xix). “Individual humans like James,” he writes, “are compelling us daily to determine what kind of ‘individuality’ we will value, on what terms, and why” (xix).  Let us not reserve our capacity to imagine for fairy tales and movie theaters or even for the confines of our own personal lives. 

 This is what writers have long known: Imagination transforms the real world, too.

Our second annual area Buddy Walk is just two weeks away and there's much to be done. I've been a little bummed out about it this year. I haven't been able to devote as much of my time to fundraising, organizing and promoting it as I did last year. And it shows. But a good friend recently reminded me that it's not just about the money we can raise. It's about awareness. It's about spreading the word. And what is the word? 

It is this: We all have an obligation to one another. We have an obligation to imagine the lives of others, to really see them, to learn them. Berube calls it an "essential ability for human beings to cultivate." Why? Because that which we perceive to be true is what we view as true. Berube writes that "we need to deliberate the question of how we will represent the range of human variation to ourselves. Will we think it outrageous to hear of disabled children in regular classrooms, or odd to come across a child with Down syndrome modeling T-shirts in a flyer for Sears? Or will we think it objectionable to see no disabled children in regular classes, no children with Down syndrome in mail order catalogues?...What will...become...of what we normally think of as 'normal'?" (261)

That was 1991, you say. This is 2014. Yes. And we have come a long way, haven't we?  But we have many miles to go. There was the doctor who asked us why we "had" K. He meant why did we not abort him? There are those who are surprised he can speak at all. Or that he can understand us. Or that he recognizes faces. Or that he can feed himself. Or that he has the intelligence to be naughty. People are still continually surprised by just how "normal" our son is. And this is 2014. If you've fallen into that category of surprised spectators, please don't feel bad. Remember that imagination once failed this mama, too.

The Buddy Walk is a single event that will last just half a day. It will raise whatever money it raises. Our physical steps will just barely cover a mile and we'll end where we started. But the ground we will cover. That is the thing. From the air, from a distance you will see a stream of people in bright yellow shirts. You will hear loud music. You will see dancing. You will hear talking and laughter. But it all means just a bit more than that. Our collective steps are just one way of fulfilling our obligation to one another, of setting a place for our loved ones at the collective human table, recognizing that our children are, in fact, their own best advocates, their own best representatives, so long as we fulfill our end, so long as we agree to see them, learn them, know them, imagine them.

We invite you, whoever you are, to come with us. To see with your imaginations. And what has until now been known but unnamed--a birth rate, a statistic, a medical problem, a misfit, or even just the stranger sitting next you on the bus—is now known by name. A person, a life, a story that is at this very moment being written. Can you imagine all the promise that story holds? I can.