How I reunited with a long lost friend: imagination

Some time ago, I wrote an article wondering where our imagination goes as we grow up.

The year 2020 has been fraught with emotional stress linked to uncertainty for most of us and needless to say, my creativity levels have been at an all-time low.

Last week, I was fortunate to go on a trip for the first time in ten months, a long weekend real, old-school pre-COVID vacation on a beautiful tropical island in the Maldives. We were confined on the island, as you often are when you travel to the Maldives even before the pandemic, so there was no need to wear a mask and ensued… normal life elevated, circa 2019.

It rained the first two days, not that it was an issue for me, I love sitting and watching the rain fall and the clouds fly by. Having basically nothing else to look at but the sky and the sea, TV off, no Netflix and no news, phone put away, just the company of a couple of friends, something amazing happened: my brain relaxed and took it all in. Suddenly it was like my eyes started seeing the world in 360 degrees instead of the 45 degrees (this is not a scientific-proven angle) that my home routine had accustomed me to.

Concretely, I started finding new enthusiasm for seemingly trivial things, such as sipping hot coffee watching the rain (hello mindfulness), and then, when the sun finally came out, snorkeling and watching thousands of tropical fish go about their lives completely unbothered by the humans stalking them at the surface. Marine life will move the most hardened of us, it is just incredible what the earth hides in oceans, sometimes a few centimeters below the surface. My energy levels boomed and my imagination woke up: old memories I was fond of came back to life, meaning I had new stories to tell my friends, we laughed watching the clouds and finding funny shapes in them (seriously when is the last time you did that?), we got creative with photoshoots (inflatable giant pink flamingo included) and found ways of solving new problems, such as scraping up spilled body oil from the floor with a plastic separator from a makeup kit or using a spoon as a lever to unhook a stuck lock on a suitcase. Sure, this are small fixes or certainly will not make a dent in the universe, but the point is, objects started having hidden uses and really, the only limit was what you could imagine doing with them. Whatever I did at that point, watching the stars or the waves softly rolling onto the shore, I was never bored.

So, how did this happen? The answer jumped to me as soon as I realized my mind was free to wander: all the causes of stress had been removed. No worries about testing positive for COVID-19, no anxiety about the results of the US election, no work-related pending anything, not even a daily schedule to keep. For 4 days, I got to experience what peace of mind feels like and I tell ya, you can’t put a price tag on that. My mind was free to roam in any direction, including discovering new places inside and outside itself instead of constantly having to focus it on specific tasks.

Too often I hear people come back from vacation saying they have been running the whole time around catching up with people and family and interacting with others and keeping a tight vacation schedule every day. This is not vacation; this is just a different daily routine in a different location. Vacation is where you manage to be worry-free for a little while and let your brain do whatever it wants on its own (feeding it Netflix content does not count). Of course, a beautiful island surrounded by turquoise water is a great enabler to let your mind wander, but the true trigger is just to remove stress, the location doesn’t really matter. No stress means the brain looks for novelty and while this sounds exhausting, actually, it is truly mazing to see that it naturally seems to immediately find novelty anywhere. Just like when we were kids. Feeling like a kid again… there is really is no putting a price on that.

I wish you to find peace of mind of your next holiday and remember, if you look for it, you may just find it.