Imagine How to Use your Imagination

Imagine walking onto an empty film set, your actors standing waiting for their direction; you have no script and no setting, you have no idea how to start the story.

So you take yourself away for a time and you ponder, you muse, you imagine.

Suddenly an idea fixes into your brain and then you drive forward; you explain to your actors what you need and a small set is constructed while you rehearse. Everything is done at high speed, and you shoot take after take until you get it right.

This may seem like a chaotic way to make a movie but this is how Charlie Chaplin worked on his first film after signing for Mutual in 1918. At the time he was the biggest movie star in the world as well as the highest paid; he devised, directed and starred in his pictures.

 

 

His was a life driven by perfection and imagination, and for that he was considered to be a living comedy genius.

Movies are no longer made this way, you could argue that many of the large releases we see lack that drive for perfection and imagination; but life is very much walked through in the same vein.

You do not have a script for life, and you don’t have a cast to do your willing. You, however, are the director and star of your life, and each day you are faced with an empty set and no idea how the story will start.

The genius of Chaplin was to capture real life and its absurdities, and to view it through eyes of comedy and pathos. It struck a chord with the world because that is real life; we gaze out of the window and see other people with a mix of the same emotions.

In Maidstone at The Archbishops Palace there is a group of drunks who gather daily, and as the morning reaches into the afternoon their drunken behaviour becomes more volatile so that by 2pm they are swearing and shouting at each other.

 

 

The fact that this happens daily is quite comic and viewing these characters can hint to the absurd; yet, the fact that this happens daily is also extremely sad, and sends a signal as to how fragile life can be. We do not know who these people are, where they have come from, but they are a part of our lives in the idea that they daily make themselves known.

Life is both comical and melancholic.

The Little Tramp of Chaplin depicted life as it was then, which is hardly any different to how it is now.

 

Set about your day with an open mind and an empty script, as you sail through the trials and stories of the day your pages will fill; when you are faced with a decision, when you don’t know where to start, take a moment.

Slip into a private space and use your imagination; ponder and muse on yourself. Decide what you want and then how you are going to get it.

Life is absurd, or at least the world around us is. Just remember, that you are the star and the creator of yours.  If you want change then you have to change it, only you.

Logic has its place from time to time, but it can also be a prison - use your imagination to reach out and you may be more in control than you would have thought.