Next to me is a photo album open to a page with a large black and white photo of four women at the beach at Catalina Island outside of Los Angeles. The ‘swimsuits’ are long black dresses. The date of the photograph is documented as the late 1890’s.
My husband is deep in a project of scanning his family history so that these precious and fragile inheritances can remain intact and accessible through online media. The job is tedious but rewarding. Yesterday, we had discussed how each photo reveals a story, but that the viewer is only privy to a filtered version of the story based on our own interpretations.
These women at the beach would be unable to vote for 30 more years. There is no doubt that their story of the ‘beach day’ would reveal many differences from our own experiences. We can imagine how hard life was for them, but without documentation through stories, we are stuck within the limitations of imagination.
Often, we think of imagination as a broad forest of possibility. For children, imagination is crucial to development and establishing an identity in a world much larger than them. We pride them for conceiving wonderful ideas and expressing their perspective in ways parents would never think to do. Imagination comes naturally for children, as they rely on the security of feeling that there is a place in the world that appreciates and values them.
But imagination stifles with age. We erase the potential of things and become cemented in convenience. We find a niche where patterns have emerged, filling a space that has adapted to our comfort and expectations. We forget that this place is a story, based on interpretations and filters meant to hold us there for the sake of maintaining homeostasis, the brain’s constant pull to an unchallenged status of existence.
Often, our heart and brain are in conflict during change, which is a good thing when it comes to agitating the waters of self-fulfillment. We fear hurting others. We fear failure. We fear success. Every excuse in the book can be found under the Fear heading because when we learned to silence our imagination there had to be a category for our stories. Freedom doesn’t arrive without struggle, because fear will always reside along resistance to an identity defined by others. Breaking free of limitations, of stories, requires a new perspective which challenges the status quo and pushes against the default structure. Fears can be overcome. Otherwise, nothing would change.
BARBIE BEATON 
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