but in some of our most despairing moods, what  goes wrong is our power of imagination. We are  

not merely 'sad'; we cannot imagine any better  life than the agonised one we currently have.  

What we really mean by imagination is the power  to summon up alternatives. When we are down,  

we can't imagine finding another job or  not minding what the gossip says about us.  

We can't imagine finding another partner  or letting ourselves trust someone again.

But on the other hand with sufficient imagination,  almost any problem can be worked around. If one  

door has closed, the imagination should in time  be able to find another. There are other cities we  

can go to, there are completely new sorts of work  we could try. There are places we can travel where  

no one knows who we are. There are lovers who  will have a very different approach to intimacy  

than those we have known to date. The oceans are  so large and beautifully unconcerned with us.

We are grown-ups, that is, people with choices.  We are not the small children we once were who  

had to depend on their parents for everything  and were imprisoned by narrow circumstances.  

We would be able to build ourselves a small hut on  the edge of the desert. We can change our names.  

If we're feeling shy and defeated, we don't have  to go out and see anyone ever again. We can live  

by ourselves, mind our own business. We can go mad  for a while and then recover; a lot of people do.

We could throw ourselves into learning a  new language or take a university degree in  

Sanskrit by correspondence course. We can find  the love we need; we only require two friends,  

or even just one, to get by. Many people might be  cruel, but a few are infinitely compassionate and  

kind and we can go out and find them and not let  them go.  

We don't have to stick  

by the script we thought we'd be following all  our lives. We might have wanted to do so – but  

we are profoundly flexible creatures. When  we arrived on the earth, our mental wiring  

was loose enough that we could have developed  into excellent foragers in the Kalahari desert,  

Latin scholars in a university or accountants in  the logistics industry. Our biology is elastic.

We may have lost a little of that  primordial flexibility and latitude,  

it might no longer be so easy to pick  up new languages or physical moves,  

but we remain eminently equipped to acquire new  tricks. Other people – noble and interesting other  

people – have been here before us. There have  been exiled Russian princes who learnt how to  

become tennis teachers, émigré South Vietnamese  army generals who started American kindergartens;  

divorcees who remarried; shamed  executives who opened corner shops.

In order to increase our chances of fulfilment,  we need to feed and massage our imaginations.  

Whatever way we happen to be living, we should  constantly force ourselves to picture different,  

more arduous but still bearable ways to be. We  could think about how we might survive without  

any friends, without a reputation, without health,  without any love, without much money. As part of  

their creative writing classes, adolescents  should be asked to produce narratives titled:  

If I lost everything and had to start up again, I  might… They could be asked to make a list of the  

20 things that currently make life meaningful;  then have to cross them all off and find 10 more.  

Only a few of us will ever need to  write short stories for a living,  

very many of us will be called upon by  fate to rewrite the stories of our lives.  

That is the true destiny and  function of the imagination.

When we are very sad, we should be  provoked by the intellectual puzzle before  

us: How else might we get by, given  how many possibilities have been  

closed to us? How could we fertilise the  dung heap we are on? Our challenge is  

to learn to rebuild our futures intelligently  and creatively on the ruins of our old lives.