"Imagination is more important than knowledge...."

…For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

- Albert Einstein


One of my top 50 songs is She Don’t Like Roses, by Christine Kane. (You can hear it on the Putamayo collection American Folk). But what’s even better about Christine Kane is that she blogs. Last year she wrote about giving up New Year’s Resolutions and picking a word for the year instead. This resonated with me because the last time I tried to keep any sort of new year’s resolution it lasted all of 5 minutes. Maybe 7. It must have resonated with others, too, because she wrote about it again a couple days ago.

Basically the idea is that instead of picking something to do as a resolution, you pick a word to focus on for the year. Examples: Hope. Courage. Kindness. Adventure. Deliberateness. Joy. Integrity. Generosity. And so on and so forth…There’s so many options, really, but probably if you think about which word would be good to focus on for you, it will come to you.

Last year, I read her idea and instantly knew my word for 2007: courage. It just jumped out at me last December. This whole year, I’ve been walking with the idea of courage. Actually, this fall it morphed into “moxie,” which I like a lot. It has a more earthy feel to it than courage, seems to be a little closer to what I mean, or what I needed to do this year. Some people who know me might think this is a surprising choice, because I do a very good job pretending to be brave in just about everything. But I wanted to not pretend anymore, and actually do things that scared me a little bit. So I did. And I’ve been surprised at how far a very little dose of guts will take you.

All of December, I’ve been thinking about my word for 2008. Several have come to mind. I thought about hope. I thought about peace-making. We need so many more peace-makers in the world, and I think I should be one of them. And then Kait found her word, and Erica did too, and I wondered, like that little bird in the children’s story who goes around asking people if they’re his mother, if I would ever find my word. I pored over the list of possibilities and nothing leaped out. So I put it on the back burner for a week or so to percolate….

Then I re-read this NYTimes article that I’ve probably posted a jillion times, about inventors who are creating things that people actually find useful. And I’ve been reading a bunch of Shane Claiborne’s stuff on community, and my word came: imagination.

We live in a world with tons of ideas swirling around, so much information that should make life easier, and yet so many fragmentations and disconnections. We have more opportunities to be in community than ever before and yet are increasingly isolated and lonely…

In the education community, we’ve boiled down school requirements to reading and doing math at high levels but don’t think about instilling a love for language in our kids or a sense of curiosity about what makes the world work. The thing is, kids have that, when they get here, that sense of wonder. Then we grown-ups conspire to drill it out of them. And I want mine back.

So my word for 2008 is imagination.