Imagine
Ever since I was a little girl I loved cartoons, especially anything Disney. Pocahontas was my favorite during that time. I was about 6 years old when my Nanny helped me sew together a Pocahontas costume using old pillowcases and sheets. I would go out back and play by the creek pretending I was that beautiful Indian princess. In my mind, there was absolutely nothing that I couldn’t be. There were days when instead of being a princess, I wanted to be an award-winning scientist. I would go around my grandparents’ Pennsylvanian farmhouse collecting different materials to “test” their chemical compounds. Other days I was a master Chef and my Nanny was my assistant. I would go down to the creek and catch crawdads in an old coffee can for her to boil for dinner that night. Later, when I wasn’t paying attention, she would replace them with something else and release them back into the creek. My imagination at that time was endless.
At that age it was so easy for many of us to escape reality with a vivid imagination. So, why does our imagination tend to escape us as adults? I believe it’s because we become comfortable with what is sociably acceptable. It’s as if our imagination is trained out of us by society. If I were to go around town with a Batman cape around my shoulders as an adult, it would be frowned upon. However, keeping our imagination alive as adults does not necessarily mean we parade around outside as our favorite childhood superhero. We can help keep our imagination alive by thinking up new recipes in the kitchen, through arts and crafts projects and by writing; whether poetry, short stories or even just journaling.
Children tend to have the ability to imagine anything, simply because they don’t have the pressure of experience weighing down their thoughts. As adults, we can imagine things also, usually only lasting about five seconds, before our rationalism snaps us back to reality. However, disappointment seems to be the easiest thing for me to imagine as an adult. Maybe, as we grow up, we just start imagining the wrong things. Maybe the knowledge we’ve gained since our youth causes us to push crazy possibilities from our mind because we consider it wasted time.
I’m just a grown-up who is intrigued as to where my imagination has run off to.
“Laughter is timeless, imagination has no age and dreams are forever.” – Walt Disney