IMAGINE THAT

I saw a nature special on TV showing cheetahs miss their prey nine out of ten times. We would be a bit short of cheetahs if they became immobilized just thinking about the length of grass, the heat, the humidity, the extraordinary speed of the antelope and all those giant biting flies that will be around to screw up the next hunt. What kind of National Geographic special would it be if after their seventh miss, the disillusioned cheetahs went back to their den all tigered out, and their fellow cheetahs laughed at them like a bunch of hyenas. Then they spent the rest of the day lion around, taking cat naps, looking like the missing lynx and feline incompetent. (Sorry, got carried away.)

A cheetah does not spend Monday worrying about Tuesday's hunt.

Human beings are the only of the universe's creations that worry about tomorrow's "hunt," because we are the only creatures that possess imagination. (Hooray for us?) Your imagination enables you to do incredible and marvelous things, but the active use of negative imagination can also send you to the home well before your time. Imagination is simply a picture you conjure up in your mind that has no reality attached to it. You conjure; you create. Does your imagination portray you succeeding, or in your mind's eye are you meeting your cellmate Buck for the first time?

When I was in grade school, I had this belief that anybody older than me could beat me up. I didn't know I had this belief until someone older than me beat me up. The Franklin twins did it (Names are changed to protect the innocent--me. After all, they're still older.) The twins, while there were obviously two of them, were only about 1/3 my size, but did I mention they were older?

Every lunch hour for months, I would go out to the playground, and take my expected verbal harassment and physical lumps from the vertically challenged, age-enhanced, double buggers. I'd go home after school, "knowing" what the next day would bring and blaming the little weasels for not only their wompping up on me in the immediate past, but also for a projected rotten evening I was sure to (make myself) have in the immediate future. I wrapped up a perfect victim's day by tossing in bed all night, wide awake, reliving in advance the certain terror that lay in store for me the very next day. (An uncheetah like activity.)

No amount of worry (negative imagination) on my part seemed to have any affect on the actions of the Franklins. (And they, unlike me, were well rested enough to carry out whatever dastardly deeds they devised.) What ever the double nut twins did to me physically was nothing like what I did to myself mentally. I turned my imagination, given me by the forces of good, over to the forces of evil.

I did it. I knew it. Shame on me. Better luck to you.


Lesson: Imagining the best can't hurt; imagining the worst can.