Willpower and Imagination
By Ludmila Rishkova
March 23rd, 2011
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." --- Albert Einstein
“Don’tcha know that no one alive can always be an angel? When everything goes wrong you see some bad
But oh, I’m just a soul whose intentions are good Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood” ---Nina Simone
Everything is relative. Particularly everything subjective. Fear, hope, love, beauty, madness, are not clearly defined and their boundaries as well as their definitions may shift depending upon individual perspective, geography, era and culture. Madness may be viewed as eccentricity, acute intelligence, creativity, or even a cultural standard. The definition is ever fluid and is only fixed temporarily and in particular circumstance.
Does this mean that there’s no clear distinction between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, between ‘good’ and ‘evil’? I do not have an answer to that question, only suppositions that I, and many others like me, take pleasure in exploring in their prose. The only reliable answer we seem to have found is that absolute extremes are hardly ever found, but that there exist many shadings and combinations of both ‘good’ and ‘evil’, of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
Intention, circumstance and willpower seem to be the major players in one’s course of life. But we are once again talking of subjectivity. Does intent work on the level of personal background? Does one choose one’s cultural, temporal, and geographic circumstances? Is there such a thing as will-power or free will, or are we just ‘programmed’ by our local beliefs?
My philosophy teachers were never able to answer these questions. Or, I shall rather say, they took a diplomatic stance and refused to take sides even though, sitting in the front row, I argued until blue in the face that such a thing as free will existed while other students yawned in the back of the class.
The teachers never got my point. My reason for arguing in favour of free will was simple. I had made up my mind that it existed, if not for others then at least for me. While my background could influence me, I could choose the direction in which to steer my feelings and myself.
Einstein once said that everything is relative and I couldn’t agree with him more. The world as we know it is fluid. Our Universe is ever-expanding, the amount of daylight is never exactly the same; love, lives and planets are extinguished and others reborn. Meanwhile, on a smaller scale, culture changes daily lives and vice versa. Everything seems to be either a fad or a fashion. Careers are created and praised until they stoop back to the level of jobs. One day we prefer historical novels, another biographic. We like genre, then we like literary and later praise the post-post modernist deconstructive. We like our women plump, then skeletal; our men raw and coarse, then sensitive and draped in silk and cashmere.
What is most amazing is that while these fads and fashions, these cultural traits and personal points of view fluctuate from one generation to the next, they also do so within a lifetime, better yet within a year, and within a day on individual basis. The past, while often viewed as better than the present, which in turn is deemed less digressed than the future, is but a speculation, opinion, and preference for the familiar over the unknown. Meanwhile, the past reappears as much in the present as it will in the future. At least one hopes so, because don’t we all think that the books, movies and fashions of our childhood were better than what is available now? But that too is subject to change. One’s willpower won’t necessarily improve one’s view of modern media, for example, just as much as it does not have the ultimate and final decision upon one’s present and future. What is important here is that, while one cannot control everything, one can at least have confidence in the power of one’s mind, which will stir him in the right direction. All that suffices is a little faith and an open imagination.