When I was a little kid I would go into my basement at my house and walk into the closet at the bottom of the stairs. In that closet we kept wine bottles, storage bins and old appliances. I remember there was a cord for the light in the middle of the closet, it was attached to a light bulb with no cover. It smelled stale and I was almost certain there were spiders crawling behind the boxes and around the bottles of wine. I would sit in the closet and imagine that one of the walls opened up to a secret hidden area of the house with rooms filled with candy and bouncy houses. I used my imagination to feel the walls of the closet looking for the secret door that lead to this magical paradise in my basement. In my mind this was like a watered down and more practical version of Narnia. 

My imagination was vivid and worked in my favor. I could turn a simple stale closet into a quest for a secret room filled with joy. This could occupy my time for hours, getting lost in my thoughts about what could be behind the closet walls, if only I could find the secret passageway. 

Today, I do still have the same imagination but it’s expanded in both helpful and non helpful ways. Our minds are capable of taking us to places just through thought. By transporting us to climates fifty degrees warmer just by closing our eyes and forcing ourselves to feel warmth. They’re capable of drowning out noise or numbing parts of our bodies so we don’t feel pain. On the flip side our minds are also capable of overwhelming us. Sometimes our imagination gets the better of us, making it hard to distinguish what is reality and what is just a scenario in our own heads. 

Thoughts have the power to turn into emotions, which cause us to have physical symptoms. Thoughts can cause an internal cascade that causes us to shut down system by system. All of the sudden our inquisitive imagination is being used against us and we can’t decipher the left from the right. Our bodies feel numb, with the only feelings being a racing heart and a loud mind. Thoughts, scenarios and judgements swirl around in our mind melting into one another. Making it hard to distinguish what’s what and impossible to have a clear thought. 

After our minds decide to be done with the self criticism and impending doom, our imagination is what brings us out of this spiral. It’s silly because it seems that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. But our imagination pulls us out of the whirl and takes us to a place of stillness. For me this place of stillness is usually somewhere within a memory around 2013 at church camp. I imagine myself sitting on the bench swing before everyone else had woken up with my water bottle and stuffed animal in me arms. I feel the sun rise as my skin gets warmer as it rises into the sky. The only sounds are the rustling of the trees and the water rolling down the rocks in the stream. Putting myself back there everything is silent, including my brain. And just like that the anxiety stops. 

But there’s no warning as to when the noise is going to start up again.