As a creative person, I believe the gift of imagination is highly underrated. Albert Einstein believed: “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.”
Creatives can encounter all kinds of barriers when sharing their imaginative ideas with others who are unable—or unwilling—to share their vision. It takes a resilient person to persevere in the face of constant rejection and criticism concerning new ideas that have been previously untested. Even creative geniuses like Albert Einstein encountered resistance to his ideas concerning theoretical physics.
Many creatives crumble in response to all of the negative feedback that is lobbed at them and find employment at a restaurant, or some other place, that distracts them from chasing after the muses in their imagination. Thankfully, Einstein was among those who persevered. Without his stream of creative ideas about how our world works, we would possibly still be in a primitive stage of understanding the mass-energy equivalence and the general theory of relativity.
Among other scientific discoveries made possible by Einstein’s imagination, his description of gravity has allowed for the exploration of space and the search for the existence of black holes. When Einstein initially shared his new ideas concerning general relativity, he was discouraged by some of his contemporaries. But now, 104 years after Einstein publicly shared his imagined thoughts about gravity, scientists have photographic evidence of a black hole in the M87 galaxy.
The next time one of my proposed creations is met with the response that “it hasn’t been done before, so it isn’t worth the risk of pursuing,” I will think of all that has flowed from Albert Einstein’s imagination, smile to myself, and believe that pursuing my imaginative idea is as worthwhile as pursuing a black hole.
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© 2019 by Julie Ryan. All rights reserved
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