Heroes Not Zombies

The gardens in front of The Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh has several thought provoking sculptures. I photographed this one many years ago.

I suppose you could look at this and see a pretty simple set of goalposts. But they aren’t set on a pitch. So rather than thinking of sport I find they always make me wonder about the whole phenomenon of goal setting.

We humans have imagination. Imagination allows us to look into the future and have visions or ideas about it. On the one hand imagination is the source of all our fears. We look into the future and we’re afraid…afraid of dying, afraid of harm, of loss and of failure (add your own favourite fears here!)

But imagination is also our creative super power which enables problem solving, the expression and communication of ideas, thoughts and feelings.

Imagination does something else too – it fashions our aims and goals. In this respect it powers our ability to achieve.

Creative visualisation has been shown to be a powerful tool which enables achievement. It’s used, for example, in sport. The Olympics are happening as I write this and you’ll often hear sportsmen and women say how they have visualised winning a medal, maybe since they were children.

But let’s return to this photo. I took my time to choose my viewpoint. What I liked, and still really like, is how you can see a small tree growing in the frame of the goalposts. That makes me focus on the tree, but it’s not just a tree growing in some random place. It’s a tree growing in the context of a goal.

That makes it a vision of the future for me and sparks my thoughts about how goal setting is more than just imagining an endpoint (which it often is). We can set our intentions on nurture and growth. We can look ahead and imagine the kind of world we would like to seed, to plant, to nurture and to care for. And we can anchor ourselves in the here and now and do what we can do today to tend to, look after and support whatever it is we want to grow.

I want to grow more love, care, understanding, wisdom and mutually beneficial relationships.

This image helps me to do that.

How about you? What future would you like to nurture today?