I was listening to celebrity photographer Jeff Kravitz being interviewed yesterday and in there he offered this piece of wisdom: “We’re all figments of our imagination.” He followed that up with a question: “So then, why not imagine big?”

Most of us play small ball based on the image of ourselves that we made up and got comfortable with. It’s that image that keeps us confined to wherever we imagine we belong.

Updating your image of yourself is the first step in getting the horse out of the barn. It’s an interesting exercise to see yourself differently than you imagined. It does take off the blinders and opens you to a bigger world.

It may seem counter-intuitive on first blush, but it seems to me that the next evolutionary step is to rid ourselves of any image whatsoever. If all our images are figments anyway, there’s no sense hanging on to anything false, no matter how big it is.

This process is more difficult than updating your image but the benefits are exponentially better than any image you hold of yourself.

The process begins when we start to own the realization that we are not any image, no matter how tarnished or polished it is.

The benefit to this is that we don’t have to pretend any longer. Pretending takes a lot of effort and that is draining. When we drop the pretense of any image, we breathe easier and get more comfortable in our own skin.

You may like or dislike labels that you or someone else has ascribed to you, but when you start peeling them off one-by-one, you get to the core of who you are which can’t be labeled, only experienced.

Harkening back to a Grasshopper blog post from five summers ago:

Who you are cannot be named. It’s like the ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao-Tzu reminded us in the opening verse of the Tao Te Ching: “The Tao that can be explained with words is not the Tao.” The verse goes on to say, “We desire to understand the world by giving names to the things we see, but these things are the effects of something subtle. When we see beyond the desire to use names, we can sense the nameless cause of these effects.”

In our trip across this pond called life, there are certain lily pads we have to get to first before we can get to the next one. Realizing you can change your image in this “frog into prince/princess” journey is the first step. The next leap before we can get to the other side is to land on the idea that we are neither a frog nor a prince. This allows us to experience the essence that makes up all labels, so we don’t have to get stuck on one.

Use your imagination and find out you are more than any label you can dream up. Quoting the photographer again, “Why not imagine big?”

All the best,

John