Imagine...

         Remember when you were a kid? Mom would kick you out of the house just after breakfast, after you did the gazillion chores she so heartlessly thrust upon you (like feeding the dog and changing it's water). As you stepped out into the yard, the world seemed limitless, even if you weren't supposed to go farther than the park at the end of the street.

If you were lucky, your buddy a couple of houses down would be finished his breakfast and finished the Herculean task of making his bed and brushing his teeth. What luck! Their water heater blew up the day before and the plumber has just installed the new one. No way was he going to take that big box away! That was the new spaceship/submarine/Batcave/clubhouse. Sometimes all of those things at the same time. 

That is Imagination.

Imagination would actually take you places you wanted to go. We really were in a spaceship. That alien out there was absolutely real (still is - it looks just like your sister/brother/relatives…). If you popped the hatch on the sub, we'd flood and sink to the icy depths, especially when the sprinkler was on. And you knew that all your secrets would be safe in the clubhouse. After all, it was a secret lair, swept for listening devices and with sound-proof walls. Can't say swept for bugs 'cause there was always a daddy long legs spider and a few ants wandering around.

As we got older, school started filling out heads full of facts and figures, some useful, others not so much. I now understand why I didn't achieve orbital velocity on the park swings, as well as how effective gravity really is. I still don't understand why we had to pick apart a really great story in English class and make it not so enjoyable to read again. Apparently that still happens now, judging from the complaints my kids have about their high school English class.

The really good teachers would nurture your imagination and compliment you on how well you used your ideas, even if the result ended up not even being close to answering the original question. The class marks may not have been so great but the time spent in those classes was worth every minute.

Then as we got older, we saw more of the world around us, had to start making plans to make a bit of money, get jobs and get ready to take our place in the adult world. It got harder and harder to use that imagination to travel to other worlds, especially when there was a deadline to meet or a shipment to get out. Now we just use our imagination to dream about winning the lottery or when we will be able to retire. We tend to dismiss our peers that still have an active imagination as flighty or goofballs. Pity us, then.

Let your imagination flow and think of the way we want the world to be - no poverty, no hunger, no strife. Just an unending universe we can explore and grow into. Imagination taught us to use tools, taught us to grow food, to tame animals to help us work the land. Imagination taught us to look at Nature and try to imitate birds and fish and took us to that reality. We looked at the stars and imagined how it would be out there and now we are taking the first steps towards them. We imagined how great it would be to be able to see people on the other side of the world and speak to them and learn from each other. Those thoughts brought us computers and the World Wide Web. It has brought the world closer and tighter together in so many ways. Now is the time to really let our imaginations run wild, so we can prepare our world to be the paradise it already is.

Imagine that.