Just Imagine

I awakened in the middle of the night with a strange smell in my nose.  Instantly, I knew what the pungent odor was, but it wasn't coming from my apartment.  As best I can tell, it came in a dream.  I don't recall any visual images or action from the dream, but I do remember the smell.  I was warmed all over by the unpleasantness.

When I was in grade school and junior high, my father worked as a tool and die maker.  He was highly skilled, and his company's customers sometimes flew him to their locations to solve problems.  On one of those trips, he was recruited for a mid-management company for one of the Big Three American auto makers.  But for all those years before he put on a dress shirt and tie, he would come home with the smell of grease on his clothes.  Despite what might have otherwise been unpleasant, it was wonderful to me.  My father and I were close, and he'd always scoop me up in a big bear hug.  If love has a smell to me, it is the smell of grease from his machine shop.

As I've pondered, I cannot remember any details of the dream, but I've felt love all day.  The consideration, however, has taken me in a different direction.  We as humans have an incredible ability to transcend time and space--you might call us time travelers.  A single thought, smell, picture, or even a phrase can transport us to another time.  For me, it was the smell of grease that reminded me of the warmth of my father's love and hugs.  The smell of fried chicken or a freshly baked pie sends me to my grandma's kitchen.  The crunch of snow under my feet recalls building a snowman as a child.

We also have the ability to travel forward in time, and doing so is something that my coaching clients frequently do as they plan for their futures.  Time travel, they find, is really the foundation of living with intention.  Creating a vision of our future self, which we firmly connect into our being, produces a target of the future.  Of course, then we have to act consistent with the vision to see it explode into our lives, but the time travel is the first step. 

How does this work?  Someone who has problems with a knee because she is over-weight envisions herself as healthy and mobile.  Then working back in time she discovers how she needs to eat and exercise now to deliver that dream. Finally, the hard part, she needs to act on what she has come to know. What do you need to do right now to enable the vision, I ask? The vision of the future healthy her shows the way.  (No matter how much of a picture she has, if she continues eating a pint of super-rich ice cream while she watches TV every evening, the vision will not find life.)

Similarly, a client who envisioned herself inspiring young women in her profession saw herself on stage giving funny speeches.  What does she need to do right now to start bringing life to the intention, I ask?  An artist who has a commission but has the artist equivalent of writer's block imagines a wonderful painting that touches the audience.  What does she need to do right now to allow that painting to move through her?  My desire to have a warm relationship with neighbors (12/9/13) started coming to life when I knocked on my neighbor's door last night with chocolate cake in hand. 

Our ability to imagine something that hasn't yet existed is as powerful as our ability to time travel backward. The vision provides those in the invisible realm that assist us to live our dreams to know what we want.  In many ways much of what I've written about in this blog has been about bringing intention to what we want to create in our lives--bringing to live what we know in our hearts.  Just imagine what we dream to start it being so.