Heart-Lifting for Disheartening Times – Storytelling Builds Your IMAGINATION

It’s all so overwhelming and it seems everyone is tired, discouraged, maybe angry or cynical or depressed, maybe confused or disheartened…just weary.
Each day during this April A-Z Blogging Challenge I’ll offer a short musing on an aspect or two of the many ways the ancient-yet-very-contemporary experience of storytelling – both listening and telling – is an enjoyable, fortifying and heart-lifting practice, for anyone!

I – Storytelling Builds Your IMAGINATION

I used to ask middle school and high school kids, when I would visit their schools, if any of them knew someone who worked out with weights, or if any of them had started doing so. After a show of hands, we’d discuss why – and it turned out that mostly it was for getting stronger to play favorite sports.

Then I’d ask them what they knew about Albert Einstein. “He had crazy hair!” “He was super smart.” “He had bad grades in school.” “E=mc2.”

And then I’d tell them my favorite Einstein quote:

“IMAGINATION is more important than knowledge.”

With all of his intelligence, with the vast amounts of knowledge he had, that’s what he said. And we’d explore together why he might have said that.

And how – just like weight training exercises and builds stronger muscles that then help you improve and succeed at soccer, or tennis, or basketball, or whatever sport the kids wanted to consider – storytelling exercises and builds your IMAGINATION that then helps you improve and succeed…at nearly anything!

Want to write a novel? Re-arrange your office? Build a house? Manage your time better? Plant a garden? Improve a relationship? Plan a trip? Compose a song? Run a 5K? Work with kids? Survive a pandemic? And on and on…EVERYTHING can be aided by having a supple IMAGINATION to plan, to plot out, to envision, to work out, to explore…

And storytelling inescapably exercises and builds the IMAGINATION!

As a teller, you imagine the story you are telling (sights, sounds, textures, smells, emotions, locations…) and share it in ways that you choose with your listeners.

As a listener…you can’t help it! The storyteller says something – and your IMAGINATION jumps right in as a partner in the creation and experience of the story inside you! The storyteller may offer some “guidelines” with gesture, posture, tone of voice, tempo of speaking, etc. – but then your IMAGINATION creates within you your experience.

Can’t help it! It happens!

Whether or not you have, or believe yourself to have, a “vivid” imagination…no matter where you may be on a continuum from “pale” to “vivid”…because you are human your IMAGINATION kicks in and is exercised and nourished every time you tell or listen to a story.

Storytelling really builds your IMAGINATION – even without heavy lifting!

Thanks for reading – Pam

Top photo by Ashish R. Mishra. Einstein photo by Hannes Richter. Swirly-imagination photo by Jr Korpa. All on Unsplash.