Next time you’re cruising to Omaha or Cedar Rapids, or just making your daily commute, try this exercise: Squint a little, and look with fresh eyes at the place where you live.

The biggest barrier to imagining and instigating possibilities is a lack of expectation. Iowa in decades past has fallen victim to this line of thinking, this concept that because Iowa is not a worthwhile place, it’s not worth making better.

Rubbish. To me, the only question is, “Why not here?”

In an obscure pair of detective books by the late British science fiction novelist Douglas Adams, characters learn that by cocking your head a fraction of a degree, suddenly a whole new universe becomes visible. Feel free to call me crazy, but I view Iowa like that. Having spent a lot of time on the state’s rivers, back roads and trails, I’ve become immersed in a different Iowa and Des Moines than many folks would believe exists.

When I share a place with a friend, they often say they never thought something so fun, so pretty or so enriching was so nearby.

I see great green fields of corn and soybeans, sure, and the rich earth also brings the bounty of fresh summer tomatoes, sweet corn and zucchini that I get to slice up, sauté and eat. I see deeply wooded river valleys full of sandstone hollows. I see regenerating prairies rising to peak blooms in road ditches and meadows. There are gurgling streams and lazy rivers and long-haul bike trails and twisting, turning off-road bike trails and country roads where a thousand adventures can begin. I once intensely wanted to leave for mountains and oceans, but now I feel fewer urgings to do so. It’s not because my craving for adventure has subsided; it’s because I live deeply here.

More Iowans can retrain themselves to expect more out of their homeland, and maybe of themselves. A solid contingent of us youngish Iowans are actively putting our new perceptions into practice. We believe that having plenty of options for active lifestyles is critical to our state. We have the optimism to believe that our sweat equity will bear returns.

Some have helped make Central Iowa the disc golf capital of the world, while others invigorate the increasingly vibrant art scene. For others, the goal is opening an art studio or a cutting-edge restaurant. For some, it’s creating and maintaining networks of mountain bike trails near Boone, in Des Moines and near Iowa City. For me and my friends in the Iowa Whitewater Coalition, it’s creating an Olympic-caliber whitewater course — the only completely sold-out venue in Athens — in downtown Des Moines and a world-class canoe trail across Polk County.

Maybe each vision seems narrow, but for each of us it’s focused. Taken collectively, these efforts add up, creating a civic atmosphere with more texture, more depth. It makes our homeland more attractive to talented college graduates and those who fled from our state in their youths.

Occasionally I get an e-mail from someone in a place with an array of offerings like, say, San Francisco, inquiring about the whitewater course. Perhaps if Iowa offered just a little more, they write, Iowa would make a better home for their children.

I have the audacity to hope so. Others do, too. The “older guard” of business interests and community leaders are getting the message, too, and don’t seem to be throwing up barriers. They even have some pretty brilliant ideas themselves. Soon you won’t even have to squint — it’ll be a whole new Iowa.

Nate Hoogeveen is the president of the Iowa Whitewater Coalition and the author of “Paddling Iowa.”