After the Kathina ceremony, while I was helping clean-up at the Wat, I started talking with LP Nut about managing my anxiety. Something he said really hit me: Everything I worry about — my cancer-de-jour, financial ruin, heart attacks, house fires, a life without Eric — it all comes from my imagination. My dis-ease arises in myself (thanks #4).

Not quite buying the premise, I retorted that there are events in life that really are sad, or bad, or worth worrying about. LP Nut was un-swayed. “Take a plane crash for example”,  he said, “you are lucky that you get to die in an instant”. Comparing an instant of death to all the suffering I face worrying about death and, I supposed, he had a point; with my imagination, I create much more/a longer duration of dis-ease than my actual moment of death. Fine, 1 point for LP Nut, but I am still skeptical.

Then I remembered another lesson from LP Nut from years before. He and I were speaking when a woman came to the Wat to make merit for a recently deceased partner. She was crying and clearly crushed. He had asked me then if I understood the cause of her sorrow? Instinctively I answered, “her imagination (#4)”. But at the time, I didn’t full understand what I have come grasp only recently (recently as in 2021, years after this blog took place) — that the woman was mourning the loss of all the good times with her loved one that she had already imagined. She cried over the loss of possibility, of a future that had never actually existed at all.

LP Nut explained that when he really thinks about it, and gathers evidence, he realizes nothing in life is exactly how he imagines it will be.

A few days later, I was sitting in the office, making plans for an upcoming trip to Japan. I realized I was excited about the trip, willing to put a ton of work into planning it, because of the fun I imagined it would be. Years before, I had been equally as excited about an upcoming trip to Kenya; of course, had I known I would almost die by rhino-run-down I certainly wouldn’t have been so excited.

It reminded me of  my early days of practice when I discovered that it is my belief in what will happen that triggers my fear and hypochondria, a problem I was able to address, albeit in a limited way, when I proved to myself there is no necessary relationship between what I fear will happen and what actually happens. You can see that blog here). Apparently, my imagination of good stuff must feed hope the same way that imagination of bad stuff feeds fear. Looks like LP Nut was on to something after all…

I decided it was time to take a closer look at imagination, the role it plays in my life, and how accurately it actually predicts the future. Much like I had done with control, impermanent, and special, I spent several months collecting and logging daily evidence. In the next few blogs, I will again chronical some of my  findings.