It can tyrannise... causing it to be happy or burdensome according to the folly to which it leads. For it makes us either contented or discontented with ourselves. Before some it continually holds up the penalties of action... To others it promises happiness and adventure with blissful delusion.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Imagination runs two swindles in opposite directions. For some it is a horror channel: the transfer that will ruin everything, the symptom that is surely fatal, the remark the boss is definitely still weighing. For others it is a lottery channel: the venture that succeeds by slide three, the corpus that compounds without SIPs actually being paid. Both channels replace the world with a broadcast, and both bill you: the first in sleep and health, the second in unstarted work. The discipline is neither suppression nor surrender; it is supervision. Imagination makes a superb scout and a catastrophic commander.
Practice
- Interrogate the horror channel with paper: write the feared scenario, its actual probability, and your first response. Fear hates specifics.
- Interrogate the lottery channel with arithmetic: run the number before the daydream gets funded (the calculators exist for exactly this).
- Notice which channel is yours at 2 a.m.; that is the one needing a supervisor, and the supervisor is a routine, not a mood.
Use this when
- Use this in the corridor seasons: awaiting results, postings, reports, biopsies. Imagination fills every information vacuum with drama.
- Use it on big financial decisions, which are exactly where both channels broadcast loudest.
Ignore this when
- Don't strangle imagination as a planner; rehearsing the worst once, deliberately, is preparation (maxim 151). Rehearsing it nightly is the disease.
- Don't mock the dreamers into caution only; a supervised imagination is also where every second career begins.
A picture of it
The test result is due Thursday; the sample went Monday. Three free evenings, and the mind offers its horror channel on loop. The discipline is small and specific: write the realistic outcomes, one response each, close the notebook. The heart still jumps when the phone rings; that part is not optional. But there is a real difference between the person who paid three nights to imagined news and the one who paid twenty minutes for a plan.
Imagination is a wonderful servant, a terrible master, and an outright criminal as an accountant.