The problem in a recession, could it be, is a lack of imagination. Too much same old, same old, proliferating everywhere with its dull already-known obviousness, like tracts of townhouses raised up overnight on farmland habitat, now sitting empty, the precious natural resource of land and habitat scarred for eternity. It is an economy stuck in a rut, of the plan to be part of the web of making a buck without any thought, without adding anything new, anything fresh. No new ways of doing something, no doing something new, tattooed upon us.

First, there is an admission of the fault, an observation of a need for quality of ideas rather than just copying something in a rote manner. Not just micro-chipping everything better, not just letting one listen to a song quickly and easily, all derivative stuff, but new ideas, new material, or even the appreciation of good old material. (That’s what we’ve invested in, technology to better copy and broadcast everything, and there is some good in that, an education, hopefully not a drowning; let’s not forget originality and fresh invention.) No wonder it's the 'derivative' investing that so inextricably a part of the current mess. They don't call it that for nothing. (And now what are they trying to do, with life insurance policies, betting against real people, real lives, the new bright idea.)

It takes a Presidential act to declare the need for imagination. “We chose to go the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Or a look backward, an observation of a testing of a national idea, as Lincoln gives at Gettysburg, still relevant today.

Build a new Parthenon, just as an invigorating construction project. Duplicate a thatch-roofed Connemara house. Recreate a real log cabin. Create a hiking trail. Celebrate nature. (WPA did stuff like that.) Go back to your roots, and learn something unexpected along the way.


Now some things we say, we regret. That goes without mention. Somethings we wish we said better. Sometimes we realize what we write might sound rather stupid. We fall sometimes into pained exercises. But yet to always be so guarded doesn't help the imagination flow freely, or let the brain reach out and take its own less-rational stab at something. That's something else to learn, something to practice. A reach for a mistake, who knows, could be something else entirely different.

Artists, poets, yogis, musicians, are there to remind us of something, how to create, how to refresh the mind, not just be a blind consumer shoveling into it, ‘getting and spending.’ That is where the modern anxiety comes from, from being stuck into the consumerist traps, not having the chance to do something new, individual, fresh and different. The autism of receiving a thousand messages with no chance to personally create one. There is, after all, a reason some people feel most relaxed when they have a chance to be creative, and some people even seek that out at weird hours, alone, wherever they can.

Have things grown to so big a scale the individual imagination is irrelevant? Invest in the arts. Read history. Write your own poetry.