Imagination is based on the logic our minds create: If we didn’t have a strict set of rules reality abides by, then there wouldn’t be rules to break to create. Innovation takes place in the reality you and I share. So how can a magical idea transcend the bounds to create? Logic sees an issue.
Good thing imagination can read between the lines.
People say that imagination is important. That it is magical, stimulates innovation. Helps kids grow. That it actually has a purpose. Hah.
So. Imagination, such as the one you will use to translate the denotations of my words (into concepts the literal definitions fail to capture and ideas that are not possible in reality)… Imagination tells you that magic is real. You drift off for a little while, and visit a land of dreams. Perhaps you hold a little stick, carved with designs, swirl it, and a brick will float. Thus levitation becomes real. Your mind, the real one, knows that this is impossible. Why then did you envision, in vividly realistic detail, a red, textured rectangular prism (perhaps dribbled with mud or bright blue spray paint) levitating without any assistance? You knew, when you saw it, there was no thin wire holding it up. It was not supported by a wall, not balancing on an elbow. It was floating in midair for no reason whatsoever. Not moving up or down but for your will. Gravity lost its hold. Now, how did that happen?
Your imagination is magic. It can do things that defy the laws of nature.
Why is this important? There is no chance that, in reality, I will be teleported to school in the morning. I won’t travel via hovercraft, rocketship, or flying whale. Unicorns are out, too.
So why bother imagining impossible things?
For the pure reeking fun of it. We humans have enough spare time that we have developed the habit. But… evolution planned for us to have an inborn entertainment system that provides for levitation and talking pets? What exactly is the purpose of this thing?
Wouldn’t evolution be content with solidifying the procedure of taking a logical series of actions that result in the most efficient solution?
I, for one, rarely think completely logically. My logic is flawed, is tainted by entertaining impossibilities. I do not perform to my best, am not the most efficient I could be. I waste my time dreaming of universes that will not make my grades improve. I spend my summers chatting with fictional characters rather than volunteering my time for others, or for money. Why be so wasteful with that time? What good comes of it?
Why should children be encouraged when they start having tea parties with fake fur stuffed with cotton, with invisible people who have no earthly presence outside of the kids’ imaginations? Isn’t that insane? Strange? Odd?
Yes. It is strange, odd. It does not follow the sound reasoning sane thoughts do. It is not the structured, organized system an adult’s thoughts favor.
What these kids are doing… they are transcending the bounds of reality to entertain inane what-ifs, to develop a human being from scratch, to step over the cliff and fly rather than fall. This is imagination given full reign to explore. And these kids are not stopped by the edges of the earth. They design a rocket, visit the sun. At the wise age of 3 years and 4 months, a boy may be the first human to ever visit the mousetrap moon. He may meet an alien sniffing around, and teach this colony of cheese-loving organisms the concept of courage. He may lead by example, and face the mighty Whiskers, become a hero. He might talk with it, rather than fight. He might learn mercy. He might recognise that some creatures can not be reasoned with, beings such as the troublemaker cat, a solitary shadow too wrapped up in anger to listen, too greedy to be reasonable, too devious to tame. He might find his best friend there, among the mice whom he had saved.
If he were denied imagination, he would never go there. He would never meet Paul, his best friend, most hearty supporter. He would not learn courage for years to come, would instead meet challenges and bow before them. He would be a novice to problem solving, provided a problem is a circumstance or action one cannot overcome. He would not have practiced overcoming overwhelming data stacked against him, would instead come to a problem and freeze. If logic brings you to a problem, you have a problem. You come to the fence and stop; you can’t get through it. And you need imagination in order to entertain possible failures, to entertain possible solutions. Imagination lets you fly over it, lets you get an aerial perspective to locate the chink in the armor. Imagination makes you dig a tunnel underneath. You close your eyes and use infrared vision to locate the fencemaster. It leads you to him. Imagination lets you talk with the fencemaster, learn its peculiarities and take advantage of them. Logic wouldn’t have thought the details significant; imagination takes these nothings and turns them into a key. Efficiency versus triumph.
I am older now, and have been met with a belief system that boggles me. What do I do? Logic fails me- their reasoning does not match my own. << System Error: Unfamiliar Coding >>
Those summers I wasted away with fiction stroke my back, calm the confusion, the anger. I look through the lens of those summers, and I decode their mindset with the empathy I had learned. I had earned it when I traveled the universe to meet with ancient civilizations and backwards cultures. Emissaries and ambassadors mentored me in the foreign, unexplored, strange space. And it was them who had my back when I wanted help.
It was to imagination I turned when reality failed me. When I came to a problem common sense (logic) couldn’t get me past. Necessity brought about the problem, and it was the lofty, ever present imagination that innovated, that solved, that pushed me on further into the future. Imagination is not chained down by the rules of reality, the laws of nature. Imagination is magic.
And it is with magic I will succeed.
After all, wasn’t the internet once a dream?
