Head in the Clouds

One scene in one of my favourite films of all time, Sister Act 2, always comes to mind when i think about daydreaming. Lauryn Hill’s character, Rita, is caught practising for the all-state choir championships by her mother, who is furious.

Singing, she tells her, does not put food on the table. It does not pay the bills. It is no guarantee of a future.

“If you want to win in life, you keep your nose in them books and out of the clouds.”

Those words felt familiar.

My parents did not use those exact words, but it felt familar. Study, work hard, be sensible, get a good job, build security. And given where I came from, that was not bad advice. But I was also a massive daydreamer.

I would spend hours imagining the life I would have when I grew up: my own home, my own family, all of that good stuff.

Later, when I started working, my imagination became considerably less sophisticated and involved winning the lottery with embarrassing regularity. For years, I had this incredibly specific recurring image of myself sitting behind a huge oak desk, being interviewed by a journalist. I had absolutely no idea what I had done to warrant the interview, but dream Audrey was clearly doing very well.

The reality was that I don’t think I ever stopped daydreaming. I think I just learned to push it down.

Some things belonged in the foreground of adult life: work, career, money, security, being taken seriously. Imagination was lovely, but it stayed in the background. I spent the best part of twenty years getting very good at the foreground.

Then, during my latest MBA module, Energy, I started doing Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

We learned about physical energy, fossil fuels and the energy transition. But then there was Fermi estimation; societal transitions alongside complexity, leadership, momentum and collective intelligence. And all the time,  I kept wondering what this module was actually doing with all these ideas, and why they were together.

I understood the individual pieces, but I still wasn’t sure why they were all there together.

Meanwhile, like a good student of The Artist’s Way, every morning I have been writing three pages.

Sometimes something interesting comes out, and sometimes it is three pages of absolute rubbish. Nobody needs to read them, and they do not need to become an essay, an article, or a LinkedIn post. I have been taking myself on artist dates, following things because they interest me, writing again, and noticing things. There is something incredibly freeing about making something that does not need to become anything.

Recently I came across a clip about creativity and play. It was arguing that you ‘cannot really be creative while being careful’. If you are preoccupied with not making mistakes, how can you explore a new idea long enough to discover whether it is one?

I kept thinking about the word careful, especially in light of that warning.

When did I become so careful?

I mean, there are good reasons to be careful, of course. Professional life rewards it. Know the answer. Demonstrate the value. Understand the audience. Be realistic. I have spent a long time learning how to do those things well.

Morning pages ask almost none of them of me; I get to write.

I’m starting to wonder whether that is part of why they matter. Not because The Artist’s Way has somehow returned imagination to me. I’m not sure it ever went anywhere. Perhaps what disappeared was my willingness to let an idea hang around for a while.

Another thing Cameron talks about is synchronicity. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that when I started. I’m still not sure I do. But I have noticed that since I started paying more attention, things keep finding each other.

I had been having long, meandering conversations with my dear friend Bukky about imagination. Then I found myself down a rabbit hole watching Jeremy Corbyn push an interviewer to imagine what it might be like if everybody had free health and social care. What caught me wasn’t really Corbyn. It was the question.

Why should that be so difficult to imagine?

Then, either through synchronicity or because my phone is definitely listening to me, the algorithm served a clip of Ruha Benjamin.

That led to another conversation, another rabbit hole, and eventually to her book Imagination: A Manifesto (Benjamin, 2024). I haven’t finished the book, but I’m already slightly obsessed with her, and with the questions she is asking.

She asks us to think about where societies direct their extraordinary imaginative capacity. Human beings can imagine growing cells in a laboratory that beat like a heart. We can travel into space, create virtual worlds and explore parts of the ocean we have never seen. Yet ask us to imagine radically different arrangements for healthcare, prisons, education or the distribution of resources and the instruction so often becomes: be realistic. This is where the question of imagination becomes political.

There is Rita’s mother again, and the old instruction comes back with her.

Get your head out of the clouds.

In a recent interview with Trevor Noah, Ruha Benjamin asks another question that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: “Who does my pessimism serve?”

Honestly, I’m not sure I know yet.

I don’t think that this isn’t an instruction to be more positive. Plenty is happening in the world to justify pessimism, and pretending otherwise doesn't particularly interest me. But the question has stayed with me, perhaps because it arrived when I was already questioning what I had spent a long time believing was realistic.

LinkedIn was supposed to be the dream job, until it wasn’t. Being inside something I once wanted let me see what wasn’t visible from outside. I came away with more questions than I had when I went in: questions about work, institutions, leadership, technology, what we are building and who it is actually for.

I never particularly wanted to do an MBA. I ended up at LIS because I had questions. Oh, and  I wanted to burn everything down. I had become so disillusioned with some of the systems and institutions around me that I could see two possibilities: learn how to navigate them, or burn the bloody things down.

But something has been bothering me about that too, because it raises another question. If the only alternative I can imagine to a system is its destruction, isn’t the system still determining the boundaries of what I can imagine?

At one of our LIS immersives, the lecturers had stuck quotations around the walls. I photographed a few because they interested me, without having any particular reason for doing so. One was from Alfred Korzybski: “A map is not the territory it represents” (Korzybski, 1933).

I took the photograph and forgot all about it, until recently.

I think I spent twenty years getting very good at reading the map, and the map worked. I do not want to rewrite my own history and pretend otherwise. It gave me security. It allowed me to navigate institutions that once felt inaccessible. It took me somewhere.

When I stopped believing in where the map was taking us, I wanted to set it on fire, because I no longer trusted its direction.

But what if the map does not contain all of the territory?

What would it mean to stop organising every possibility around the thing I am criticising? Can I work inside an institution without believing the institution knows the limits of what is possible? Can I understand a system, use what is useful in it, perhaps even take resources from it, without allowing it to have the final word on what I value?

Around the same time, I came across Dr Nicole Rawls talking to a Two Spirit Navajo graduate student about entering academia. She described the institution as the “belly of the beast” (Rawls, 2026).

I almost laughed when I heard it.

I had been using exactly the same phrase to describe my own experience of LinkedIn.

But Rawls was doing something different with the belly. She wasn’t simply talking about escaping it or destroying it. She was asking what it might mean to enter an institution knowing what it is, access the resources it can offer, and still refuse to give it parts of yourself it has no right to consume.

Yup, I’m still thinking about that.

Not long afterwards I came across Dr Karida Brown talking about the relationship between intellectual work and the present. Her argument,was that scholars and artists cannot only make the work that the current moment knows how to reward. Sometimes you work on questions that are unfashionable. Sometimes the work is not for the market as it currently exists. Sometimes you may not even live to enjoy its fruits.

I have spent most of my professional life in systems where value needs to become legible quickly. Who is this for? What is the outcome? What is the return? How will we measure it? I don’t suddenly think those are bad questions. Twenty years in marketing has probably made it impossible for me not to ask them.

But do they always have to be the first questions?

What happens to the things whose value the present doesn’t yet know how to recognise?

At this point, I go back to Ruha Benjamin. In an interview, she's asked what she does when her own imagination “shrivels” in the face of everything that makes change feel impossible. She calls this a strong historical imagination. She remembers things that once seemed unimaginable and are now so ordinary that we barely notice them.

Chattel slavery once appeared permanent to people whose mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers had lived within it. Public education beyond a tiny privileged group was once a radical proposition. Things can move from impossible to contested to completely mundane.

Benjamin keeps a quotation from Octavia E. Butler in her office:

“We can, each of us, do the impossible as long as we can convince ourselves that it has been done before.”
(Octavia Butler, 1998)

I had already been drawn to that same quote, and discovering that she keeps it in her office made me like it even more.

Then the good ole’ algorithm brought me to Dr Tressie McMillan Cottom where she mentioned the quote, “The future has a past” She was talking about Mariame Kaba’s idea that “hope is a discipline”, a formulation I find much more useful than optimism. Hope, in Kaba’s sense, does not require the absence of anger, sadness or frustration. It is a practice.

I’m wary of tying those together too neatly. They come from different traditions and are doing different work. But I keep noticing them appearing beside one another.

There we are again with synchronicity…..or perhaps it is simply what happens when I start paying closer attention.

And then I go back into my Ruha Benjamin rabbit hole, where, even though we often talk about being our ancestors’ wildest dreams, she asks what it would mean to be our descendants’ wildest dreams.

Was I practising some kind of radical imagination as a child when I disappeared into the life I imagined having one day?

Baby Audrey, who imagined the adult Audrey, had no idea how she'd get there. She imagined territory and didn’t have a  map. Adult me now lives inside some of what she imagined. I also live inside possibilities that my ancestors  before me imagined, fought for and sometimes never personally experienced.

So what does commitment look like in the other direction?

If I am willing to think of myself as somebody’s descendant, what does it mean to be equally committed to people who will inherit what we are making now? Not necessarily my biological descendants. People who will inherit our institutions, technologies, workplaces, assumptions and versions of what counts as realistic.

What might they need us to be capable of imagining now?

And this is roughly where, while writing all of this, I found myself asking the question that has irritated me throughout this module all over again:

What has any of this got to do with Energy?

Why did we have to do The Artist’s Way as part of the last module? Why did a module that began with physical energy and the energy transition contain Fermi estimation and complexity, but also creativity, intuition, leadership, collective intelligence and The Artist’s Way?

So I went back to the module guidance.

It talks about “creating the right conditions”, emergence, holding a foot in different horizons and going “beyond critique” to surface or create things we value. It asks us to understand how we connect with creativity, inner wisdom and intuition, and what regular practices enable that connection.

I’m still suspicious of stretching the word energy until it becomes a metaphor for everything. I don’t think imagination is energy in the same sense that a joule is energy, and pretending otherwise would make the whole thing less interesting rather than more.

But perhaps I was asking the wrong question when I kept trying to work out what all these things had in common.

Maybe I should be asking what they make possible.

What allows a system to move? What allows an idea to move between people? What moves something from unimaginable to imaginable, from imaginable to possible, and eventually, sometimes, into the utterly mundane? What creates momentum when the outcome is uncertain?

But I can see something now that I couldn’t see at the beginning.

Imagination on its own clearly isn’t enough. Power matters. Money matters. Infrastructure matters. Institutions, politics, relationships and collective action matter.

Still, I keep coming back to one question.

Before something can move towards a form that does not yet exist, doesn’t somebody have to be able to conceive that the present form is not inevitable?

Maybe that is why these morning pages have become so important to me.

They are not changing the world; sometimes they aren’t even changing my morning.

But they may be changing my relationship with what I allow myself to imagine about the world.

And Rita?

She joins the choir anyway. They go to the competition, and they win. Of course they do, it’s Hollywood.

But I think I am beginning to understand why I remember that scene so vividly. Some part of me recognised the girl being told to keep her nose in her books and her head out of the clouds. Another part of me needed to see her put her head back in the clouds anyway.

I don’t know what happens if I do the same.

For once, I’m trying not to ask the idea to prove itself before I find out.

References

Benjamin, R. (2024) Imagination: A Manifesto. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Brown, K. (2026) Instagram reel discussing scholarship, artistic work and thinking beyond the demands of the present. Instagram. Original reel

Butler, O.E. (1998) Parable of the Talents. New York: Seven Stories Press.

Cameron, J. (1992) The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.

Cottom, T.M. (2024) Instagram post discussing pragmatic hope, history and the future. Instagram. Original post

Kaba, M. (2021) We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organising and Transforming Justice. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Korzybski, A. (1933) Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Lancaster, PA: International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company.

Rawls, N. (2026) Instagram reel discussing institutional navigation and the “belly of the beast”. Instagram. Original reel