Free Your Imagination

Especially to people who see themselves as hard-headed realists, telling you to free your imagination seems like the worst possible advice. Perhaps you know people who feel that way. Self-styled realists often equate imagination with wishful thinking, and they see imagination as
a way of avoiding reality, its unpleasant side in particular. For them, exercising their imagination is fundamentally opposed to facing reality. But too much pessimism can be just as dangerous as too much wishful thinking, and perhaps even more so. The Danish storyteller Hans
Christian Andersen describes its effects in his fairy tale “The Snow Queen.”

As the story begins, the most wicked of all the gnomes, the Evil One himself, has devised a terrible invention. He has invented a looking glass with the peculiarity that anything good or fair disappears into nothing when reflected in the mirror, while anything bad or foul becomes much worse. In this mirror, the loveliest landscapes look like cooked spinach, and the most attractive people become ugly and stand on their heads. Anyone who has a freckle can be sure that it now covers his or her nose and mouth. Faces become so distorted that no one can recognize them.
You might expect that the people would keep away from such a wicked invention, but just the opposite happens. People go to the Gnome School, run by the Evil One, and proclaim far and wide that a miracle has happened. They hold up the distorting mirror so that every-
one can see it. “Now at last,” they say, “you can see how the world and mankind really look.”
What they saw had no more to do with reality than would the contents of a mirror that reflected only what was beautiful and pleasant. But they had become so cynical and pessimistic that they could no longer recognize this. Pessimists who see nothing but bad are just as deluded as optimists who see nothing but good.


The people in “The Snow Queen” in effect suffered from a mild or perhaps not so mild—form of depression. They had become so demoralized that they could no longer distinguish between being realistic and being pessimistic. There are a number of possible explanations for why this may have happened. Perhaps they genuinely had experienced such unhappy lives that they had no choice except to believe the worst. Perhaps they were poor at problem solving and became discouraged when they could not cope. Perhaps they were unduly influenced by pessimism in the surrounding culture. But whatever the reason, the effect was to undermine and cloud their judgment. To believe that things can never become better is self-destructive. Too much pessimism saps morale and paralyzes the mind. It can make you feel so convinced things have to be bad that you unconsciously make them turn out that way. The optimistic belief that things can be better is the spark that ignites imagination. Imagination in turn enables creative innovation and adaptive change.