Saturday, June 10, 2006
"I" is for Imagination
Imagination is one of the most vital pieces of life. It allows us to laugh, to play, to draw, to create, to write, to pretend, to step outside those well-referenced boxes, to become our best selves, to learn more and better, to conquer fear, to accept and even conquer sadness and pain, to live despite awful events, to live in awful circumstances. To endure. To soar. There are, of course, the things John Lennon's song tells us about imagination. There are, every day, new games, paintings, books, poems, ideas. . . . There's artistic imagination, helping us make beautiful and interesting objects. There are personal connections that cause wonderful things to happen, such as that the one showing the power and impact of imagination on a student and a teacher, movingly told about in a recent piece in the NY Times. But to me it's personal imagination that is most important. It's what little children have when they make unexpected connections. It's what humorists have when they scrunch up a napkin and portray all at once the mustachioed villain, the bow-in-hair damsel in distress, and the bow-tied hero. It's what poets have when they put words together like "no man is an island" and "I love thee like a summer's day". It's what some technical people have when they envision and build complicated tools. It's what some statesmen have when they forge societies. It's what we all have when we let ourselves be fully ourselves.
Labels: reflections
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