Imagination!
Don't ever lose it.
Today, on National Imagination Day, do you believe you’re imaginative? When is the last time you daydreamed? Wished upon a star? Tossed a coin in a fountain? Or have you forgotten the fancies of your childhood?
According to Merriam-Webster, imagination is “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.” I’m guessing you still have this ability, but perhaps you doubt yourself.
My father used to say he wasn’t creative, but he was wildly imaginative. He invented adventures about Dork Lonnigan and Drahcir Naglig to entertain us. His spreadsheets were dizzyingly accurate and intricate. He helped create the check clearing systems used by the banking industry. I couldn’t have done that latter had my life depended on it.
My mother’s imagination was equally powerful. She solved problems and puzzles. She disguised food I thought was disgusting in delicious ways: liver became pate, tongue…well, I didn’t know I had eaten tongue until many years later when it was placed on the table whole instead of sliced. She made abstract concepts, like a circle’s infinite number of diameters, comprehensible to a brain not yet developed enough to grasp abstraction.
In addition to honoring my superbly imaginative parents, I salute all of you. Don’t say you have no imagination or aren’t creative, because you are! I promise you, you are. Perhaps not in a traditional way, like a story teller or a painter or sculptor or musician, but you have thoughts no one else has ever had, and that my friend, is imagination.
If you don’t believe me, go back to your childhood. You made up games? Stories with your dolls or toy cars and trucks? You didn’t lose that ability. You let adulting make you forget. It’s okay to remain childlike (not to be confused with childish…don’t be childish) and playful. When you welcome your little self to whisper games and secrets in your ear, you’ll rediscover your imagination.