Imagination is not make-believe, and it is not a door out of the world. It is the way we reach the parts of the world that have not arrived yet.

We are taught to file it under play, or under escape, as the place you slip off to when the world in front of you gets to be too much to carry. I think that has it backwards, because the most real things in any life are almost always the ones that were imagined long before they were ever real: the work you gave yourself to, the people you chose, the slow person you became. Not one of them was standing in front of you on the day you first reached for it. Something in you felt it while it was still nothing at all, and went on reaching until it was there.

What already exists can at least be sensed, weighed, pointed at, while what does not exist yet offers none of that, nothing to hold onto, until someone reaches out and feels it into the first rough shape it will ever wear. That feeling is the reach, and the reach always has to come first. Attention can only keep what is already here; imagination is the part of us that travels out past the edge of the present and comes back carrying something that a moment before was not anywhere.

It is also how we come to know one another, and that may be where it matters most of all. To imagine someone well is not to invent a person who isn't there; it is to hold open the room they have not yet grown into, and then to keep standing in that room, without hurrying them, until the day they can walk into it on their own. Almost everything I have known go wrong between people began right here, where one person could not sense another as anything more than what was already in front of them, so that smallness quietly became the whole of what the other was ever allowed to be. The reverse is every bit as true, and far gentler in how it works: to be imagined generously, even once, even by a single person, is one of the few forces in a life that can actually change who you turn out to be.

And if something that does not yet exist has begun, even faintly, to pull at you, some possibility or some person or some life you can already half feel, then trust that the pull itself is the realest part of it, that it is already the beginning of the thing, and that you were never going to feel certain before you reached. You only have to keep reaching. Almost all of how anything becomes real is just that, the reaching done over and over, until one ordinary day it is simply, undeniably there. When that day comes, I would love to know what you felt.

Reach for what is not here yet.

Curtis

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