Your imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions. – Albert Einstein

I was walking in the fields with the dogs, fresh snow all crunchy underfoot, and looked across the Irish Sea up to Scotland, and it was breathtakingly beautiful.

I wanted to take a pic for you, but an iPhone isn't up to that magnification.

So let's try this.

Imagine if you will, deep darkest blue expanse of sea broken by the first line of shore about 20 or so miles away

Then dark coloured mountains, and then behind those, snow capped peaks. Their whiteness, iridescent in the pink morning sunrise.

Truly awe-inspiring!

A white cloud coming towards me, dropping snow into the sea.

This became deep grey as the density thickened and snow became heavier.

Heavy streaks falling into the water.

Then it was time to scamper back home, before that lot was unceremoniously dropped on me from above!!

Could you see the scene from my description?

Our imagination is the most powerful tool we have.

Yours is just as powerful as anyone else's.

And our thinking about our future will definitely shape our experience of our life as we age.

May I ask how you are picturing your next few decades?

Are you fearing ageing or looking forward to this new part of your life?

Are you falling prey to advertising (which by the way is a multi-billion £/$ industry) that to age is wrong, that we must buy all the 'things' to try and slow it down, and the phrase that drives me chuffing mad, "reverse the ageing process"!

What, in the absolute name of f**k, is that all about?

We age from the day we are born. Fact.

THE only thing guaranteed in life, is that we at some point will die. 

Fact (unless you can shed some light on this and help me out here? As far as I am aware, everything else we do is by choice.)

So why are we consistently being 'groomed' to use our imagination to fear this amazing life we are privileged to be living?

It makes my blood boil...and because I'm ever curious 😉 this comes from...

To enrage someone. The term the blood boils has meant anger since the seventeenth century. The precise cliché appears in Thomas Macaulay's History of England (1848): “The thought of such intervention made the blood, even of the Cavaliers, boil in their veins.”

So Cavaliers aside, and deciding to take back control of my brain (sorry Eric) I get to decide how I want to use my imagination and so do you.(yours not mine!) I am not going to use mine to make me feel I am not enough, that laugh lines are wrong and that grey hairs are a sign that I am past it!

How about you?

Are you going to fantasise about all the good things you would love to do with your life, continue to live a life of ho-

, or create veritable nightmares and worry yourself into an early grave, over something that will in all likelihood never happen?

I wonder where we would be today if Marie Curie, theoretical physicist Dr Shirley Jackson, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs, et al. had all sat about lamely despairing about the fact that no-one else believed them or had a fraction of their inkling of the genius about to unfold.

Most of their peers didn't believe in the power of their imagination.

Simply put, if you don't believe it is possible, it's extremely unlikely that it will be.

So, where is your imagination taking you for the rest of your life?

Midlife is the perfect time to reassess everything in your life...decide what you want to do more of and quite frankly what you're happy to let go. 

Imagine taking back some control and actually deciding how you want to live and what you want to do, rather than letting more years flow on by.

Your time is precious.

Your life is precious.

You are precious.

Love. Marianne.