Pushing Thirtyy

A World of Pure Imagination

Sitting on the floor of my brother’s apartment, I play with his son, my nephew.  Just shy of 3 years old, he’s so smart.  He mimics everything I say.  He loves to play with toy cars and trains.  He knows all the types of cars he has — mail truck, fire truck, dump truck, everything.  I watch him and can see his imagination running wild, and I yearn so badly to feel what he is feeling as he learns all about the world.

As a kid, it is so easy to use your imagination to build a world around you.  From role playing, to building forts, to creating families and characters  with dolls and creating different situations for them to tackle.  We play games, pretend to be airplanes, are afraid of monsters under our beds.  Our world in reality may be small, but in our imaginations, the world is full of endless possibilities.

As we get older, we stop playing these games and our imagination morphs into something else.  I was into witchcraft as a teen and after seeing The Craft and Now & Then one too many times, I kept a spell book, read tarot cards, held seances in the nearby cemetery.  I was going to bring Judy Garland back from the dead.  When I wasn’t being a witch, I was dreaming of boys and my future husband. Who in my class would I marry?  The world was small, still, and I was still shielded from life’s harsh realities.

I didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life, but I was a writer. I was a poet.  I was going to somehow make my name known to the world with my words.  The pain that I felt between the real life tragedies and the teenage dramedies I created, I had something to say.  It is in my writing that I am able to connect back to the imagination that lives deep down inside me.

I know it is there.  We don’t ever lose our imagination, but the realities of life put a damper on what we think is possible.  We see obstacles, timelines, responsibilities, impossibilities.  All of those silly ideas we had as kids seem so unfathomable.  We lose the optimism that comes with having a great imagination.

It is true that there are some things we cannot control. This is something I have to remind myself of everyday.  But my fantasies, my dreams, my imagination, these are the things I try to push to the forefront.  Because a world without imagination is a world without light.