When I was young, I was fond of daydreaming. It gave me many hours of pleasure. I usually daydreamed of scenic places that looked like paintings.
I daydreamed my adventures. I rode horses, bikes, cars and airplanes going to strange lands to battle pirates and bandits. In these figments of my imagination, I composed all the elements, all the details in full color.
Daydreaming made up for all the things I wanted to do but couldn’t, things that I wanted but didn’t.
When I was in college, I discovered the art of writing stories and reportage. My capabilities to visualize scenes helped me a lot in writing. Even the characterization of persons became realistic when I visualized them first.
When I created a picturesque visual, the right words came naturally when I wrote the narrative, thanks to my daydreaming habits.
In my adult years as an advertising creative director, thinking visually was one of the indispensable tricks of the trade.
Print, radio and TV advertising are visual arts, with radio as the branch where you paint using words. All these artistic pieces have one critical task, and that’s to persuade. Time is very limited. We often bypass the brain and go straight to the heart.
When I was in my late 40s, I discovered another fantastic advantage of thinking visually. It could lower my high blood pressure.
I was diagnosed as hypertensive at age 48, during the height of my fast and furious career in the fastest-rising ad agency in town. I was also recently widowed (I’m now happily remarried). I was trying hard to be stoic, warding off grief and loneliness at odd hours. Working late nights usually gave me headaches the next day.
My doctor at Makati Med gave me the usual pills to manage my blood pressure. They’re called maintenance drugs, and I had to take them everyday for the rest of my life.
I sometimes felt my blood pressure go up in the mid-afternoon—sometimes, in the middle of my management meetings.
Surge of warmth
The symptoms were alarming. I would feel a sudden surge of warmth flowing like a wave inside my upper body, going up to my shoulder, neck and head, a real hot flash. A slight dizziness hung over my head together with that clammy feeling. I was told it was due to excitement or stress. When this happened, I would go up to my bedroom (I lived on the fourth floor of our office) to lie down.
Since stress is mentally driven, I figured I could also bring it down mentally. I came up with an idea. I would use the power of my imagination to bring down my high blood pressure.
I pulled down the shades, put on the air-con, closed the door, turned on my soothing Japanese Zen-like flute music and lay in bed with my eyes closed.
In my imagination I created a panoramic Kurosawa-type landscape with contrasting bright and subdued hues—wide, bright sky, big blue snow-capped mountain, golden meadows fringed with flowers and hedges, and green rainforests on both edges.
There was a clear brook in the middle that bubbled as it flowed toward the placid lake down below. I concentrated on the water flowing downward as I whispered to my self, “Go down, high blood pressure, go down, as I go with the flow slowly.”
I followed the flow down from my eye level slowly, down the lake. The bubbling water sounded fainter and fainter as it reached the lake. I went with it down the lake, where I felt its coolness. Down and down I went with it slowly, many times over until my whole being felt light and cool. After 30 minutes, I opened my eyes.
I went down to the office clinic to have the nurse take my blood pressure. It had gone down. My mind commanded it to go down in my daydream. It was thinking visually in fantastic form. I did it every time my blood pressure went up.
Our brain is an amazing organ for conceiving ideas, composing opinions and painting pictures. Its cognitive capability allows us to exist to the fullness of our intellectual and emotional faculties.
All our vocabularies for thinking and feeling come from our mind. Having a fertile mind means we have a keen perception of things and happenings around us. We understand man and nature better.
When we use our imagination, everything seems possible. We are only limited by our physical movement and our inability to fathom the mysteries of the universe. Still, our imagination can soar. Our spirit can transcend and intuit all the way to the concept of our immortality.
Thinking visually works wonders. Try to think visually. The possibilities are endless.
E-mail the author at hgordonez@gmail.com