Body & Spirit : Inspirational Moment

"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will." - George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw is the only person in the world who was ever awarded both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar. He didn't even want to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, but accepted it due to his wife's persuasion, and asked that the monetary award be used towards translating Swedish books to English. He founded the London School of Economics and Political Science amidst his discontentment with the school system, saying "Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents".

He was a writer of plays, short stories, novels - and believed in changing our environment and empowering people to assume their active roles in society. He once said, "I, as a Socialist, have had to preach, as much as anyone, the enormous power of the environment. We can change it; we must change it; there is absolutely no other sense in life than the task of changing it. What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods."

Sometimes we become so accustomed to taking the back seat, and allowing others to add form to our lives - instead of evaluating the things that we want and imagining the world as we'd like to see, and developing our hopes into realities. We allow politicians to tell us what the majority of us think, we allow the TV to dictate to us what is beautiful - But, we have minds of our own, we have the power to form the world into what we would have it.

In the beginning of 2011, I was directed to one of George Bernard Shaw's quotes - "Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will." Let us begin to imagine and think for our futures and create our visions. It's 2011, a new year, with new opportunities - welcome and create them.