The mind has a really simple job description: invent a better future. This is called imagination. And it releases us from the tyranny of merely repeating the past.
This is far from simple: imagine something new. It is slow and error-prone. But when it happens, the result can be brilliant. The mind is always looking for possibilities by asking this simple question:
Is this interesting?
Being interested is always good. It implies that we are engaging with an expansion in our outlook and in how we see the world. And that sounds just like learning.
We are inventing all the time: nearly every sentence you speak or write is a completely new invention.
This process of imagining, of thinking, of understanding is very hard to describe or to explain. I can’t really tell you what you have to do to imagine a beautiful melody. That makes it mysterious but also a bit hard to work with. I can teach you how to sing my melody but you have to learn how to make your own melody.
It’s just a shame that the process is slow: imagine if you could write an essay as quickly as you can drop something that is too hot. It is a bit more problematical, as we will see later, that it also makes errors: that we can imagine futures that are worse not better.