Imagine...
WHEN you are stuck in a long wait – in a hospital lounge, outside a dentist's room, in an airport transit hall, at a bus stand, in a crowded bank lobby – you feel you are a prisoner of time. You can't leave the place and your cell phone has run out of battery. You can't do anything, you can only stand and wait and fidget.
Before you get entrapped in such a situation again, carry a spiral notepad and a pencil with you wherever you go. In a dead time zone, fish out your pad to doodle or scribble observations, ideas and thoughts that just happen to graze you mind.
Another interesting way to pass time is to play Imagine with yourself.
Imagine you have ten million dollars, heck, make it a hundred million. Imagine how you're going to spend it. Bill Gates spent it building a shopping mall, hotel resort, cinema hall and museum in one location and calling it "home". To announce the fact that although he's rich, he's also smart, he even bought Leonardo da Vinci's set of notebooks for over $20 million and have it on display in his istana.
You may not have as many green bills as Bill but you're infinitely more resourceful, at least in your imagination. So, with the money you have imagined, what is the first thing you are going to do?
Quit your job, of course. Life is too short to work for others! Buy two houses, one a thatched cottage and one a large apartment in a choice city location (preferably a location next to a lazy winding river or a mirror lake, such as in Melbourne or Hangzhou). Imagine furnishing your two houses so that both are diametrically different in ambience and decor.
Inside the ivy-entwined country cottage, you furnish it with high-tech gadgets, a home theatre system and shiny gym equipment. But in your city apartment, all should be 15th-16th century Ming Dynasty genuine or reproduced rosewood and mother-of-pearl furniture, with old masters and calligraphy scrolls on the walls. Other than the hidden wiring, airconditioning, underfloor heating and plumbing, there must be no visible trace of chrome and gear in the city apartment, not even a TV set or a PC.
Make an unhurried trip around the world, to all the adrenalin-pumping places you have read in adventure books as a kid: the 800km Pilgrim's Walk in the Pyrenees, England's mist-shrouded Lake District, the Valley of the Kings where many mighty pharaohs were buried, the Khyber Pass that Alexander the Great passed through to India, the city of Benares where Buddha preached his destiny-changing first sermon, the Cloud Forest of Costa Rica, the 4,380km Congo River in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the Mountains of the Moon, a seven-hour bus ride from Kampala, and Tierra del Feugo, first explored by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, at the bottom of the world. Take your time to take note of the places before you move on.
If you are the randy sort, imagine what a few millions can buy in service and attention from the most beautiful women in the world. Imagine yourself night after night making love to a different girl. Set aside ten million dollars for this, and even if you spend a million a year buying love, the amount will last you 10 years, a pretty long stretch of sheer, unmitigated pleasure.
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, have we existed.
Invest in some audacious enterprise, such as,
(a) Buying a stretch of barren land in a barren sub-Sahara location and planting trees to convert it into a dense forest;
(b) Building a children's hospital staffed with good doctors, to offer free treatment to sick children the world over;
(c) Constructing an undersea glass dome, the size of a football stadium, complete with living quarters, to study and gawk at marine life;
(d) Organising an annual million-dollar contest for the most useful breakthroughs in the treatment of intractable diseases;
(e) Laying out a fullscale livable replica of an ancient metropolis -- Athens, Babylon or Changan -- but with concealed modern plumbing and electricity, and invite people to live and work in it rent-free. If your city is Athens, then hire a bunch of unemployed philosophy professors to give Platonic dialogues to visitors; if it's Changan, then get poets to come and declaim their works while beautiful singsong girls in translucent dresses play the lute in the background. If it is Babylon, get artists and sculptors to produce works that defy the imagination.
And when the money runs out before you have completed anything, just imagine more!
Dr Johnson & the resources of his own mind
"He had apparently decided that the evening was a failure so far as talk was concerned. If he had not come dressed in his best clothes he might have had a book in his pocket which he could have pulled out and read. As it was, nothing but the resources of his own mind were left him; but these were huge; and these he explored as he sat with his back to the piano looking the very image of gravity, dignity and composure."
-- Virginia Woolf, on Dr Samuel Johnson passing an evening among company to whom he had nothing to say. The Second Common Reader, 1986 ed., p124. More on Dr Johnson
