“If what we do and feel today is not in harmony with what we want to be tomorrow, the meeting with our hope at the end of the trail is likely to be embarrassing or even hostile. Thus it often happens that a man slays his hope even as he battles for it.”

Eric Hoffer

In our lives, we face so much inertia, fear, and doubt. We stride forth into the world with aspirations that ignite our hearts and fill our dreams, only to wear ourselves down with reasons why we can’t do it, falsely prophetic visions of what can go wrong, and the infectious doubts of others.

Many people grind themselves into the dirt and stay there.

They slay their hope.

One of the greatest casualties in this tumultuous age is our creativity — and creativity is, on the flipside, a strong inoculation to despair. I don’t say that without having experienced it myself. Sometimes the razor’s edge between hope and oblivion rests on a seemingly inconsequential creative act.

The Irish poet and philosopher, John O’Donohue (1 January 1956–4 January 2008), explores so much in his thought-provoking book, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. Chief among his explorations is your journey with yourself:

“The shortest distance in the world is the one between you and yourself. The space in question is tiny. Yet what goes on in this little space determines nearly everything about the kind of person you are and about the kind of life you are living.”

There are many things beyond our control. Life is ruthless in that way. But of what we can control, most of it resides in ourselves — how we think, how we act, what we believe, what we refuse to believe. For better or for worse, we are the architects of our beautifully imperfect lives.

Some people build themselves up.

Others tear themselves down.

I have been on both ends of that spectrum. I have toiled to get myself to certain heights — and I’ve dragged myself down from those same pinnacles, like an Icarus who has flown too close to the sun. Everyone tastes this sooner or later. Shattered dreams. Betrayals of self. Wounds that go soul-deep. And in that there’s the temptation to stay down, to believe that this shattering is all there shall ever be. Our imagination suffers here. Blinders arise. In dark times, the temptation is to accept our shortcomings as incurable.

As O’Donohue writes, that’s not the case at all:

“No person is a finished thing, regardless of how frozen or paralyzed their self-image might be. Each one of us is in a state of perennial formation. Carried within the flow of time, you are coming to be who you are in every new emerging moment.”

Each of us is creation in motion, a living tapestry woven from moment to moment, either by our own hand or by default, but it will be woven until the thread is cut.

For those who lie in the dirt and abandon all imagination and creative power, the default weave takes hold. Patternless, grey, and in the end, wasteful. It doesn’t have to be that way. The creative spirit is always at work. Suppressed, lost, but never dead. When life is glum and the future seems worthless or, so often, we ourselves feel worthless, we need to open ourselves back up to the imaginative light that we used to have, the craving to break out of the shackles of our own making — because of all the prisons we face in life, the ones we impose on ourselves are the most insidious. No one has ever imprisoned me. No situation has ever trapped me. But I have certainly entrapped myself. So have we all at times.

I encourage you, whoever you are, whatever your circumstances, to dare to be creative still, to imagine something better, to step beyond the narrow boundaries and follow that voice that says you still have a chance.

Not daydreaming. Not wishful thinking. Envisioning, creating in the mind, and then in reality through deeds.

But what about the risks? What about our fears? Our reasonable doubts?

To hell with them.

“The irony is that we don’t need to worry,” O’Donohue writes. “We can take a lot more risks that we realize. It is interesting to ask: what are the limits you have set for your life? Where are the lines of these limits? Why do you think you cannot go beyond them? How real are they? Did you construct those limits out of anxiety or fear? If you were to go beyond your most solidly set limits, what difference would it make to your life? What are you missing by remaining confined?”

For me, these questions yield painful longing, because I know they expose all the so-called limits as fear, doubt, delusion, pessimism, and all other manner of flimsy constructions built up over a lifetime.

It is uncomfortable to face the ruins in one’s own life, knowing no one else is responsible for them but oneself. Some people have ruined relationships. Others have ruined dreams or careers. Some, despite having all the material riches in the world, have ruins of their deepest and most authentic selves. And the more we let fear limit us, the more we box ourselves in, the harder it gets. But it’s all a trick, a mental game. We all have the ability to think and therefore to grow.

This is nothing new. Marcus Aurelius, one of the great Roman emperors, had the same discovery long ago: that the things we think about determine the quality of our minds, that our souls take on the color of our thoughts. Your own unique creativity can be the torch that reveals your limits for what they really are: a threshold, a gateway, not a wall.

“The awakening to the beauty of your creativity can totally change the way you view limits. When you see the limit not as a confining barrier but as a threshold, you are already beyond. The beauty of imagination helps you to see the limit as an invitation to venture forth and view the world and your role in it as full of beautiful possibilities.” — John O’Donohue

Your ability to create in your mind what hasn’t yet been made real, to see yourselves beyond the myopic lens of the here and now — that is a gift we all have, and can all nurture still, in darkness and in light.

It can open up the world and show us that we still have a place in it. Perhaps different than the place we have now. Perhaps not the place we’d had in mind in our youth. But a place nonetheless, full of beautiful possibilities.

If we rekindle our ability to think, to dream, to imagine, and then to act, we can rise up out of the dirt and breathe that clean air again. And all the lies we’d seen and lived, we’ll realize were just the deceitful grit in our eyes. There is still something better out there. There is still life that needs living. Not just living to get by, but joyfully, meaningfully, in spite of all the afflictions of being on this side of the ground. And to do that, we must think and act in a way that nurtures the kind of tomorrow we really want, not the one we think we have to settle for.

Dare to create your life, and re-create it, as often as you must.

Possibility is the gift of creativity.

(Originally posted on Publishous)