Blogtober Day 28: Imagination

Growing up, I was taught various virtues of the sort I'm sure every child is introduced to.

Kindness, Patience, Cleanliness, Honesty, etc.

I've always thought we were missing one that is all too important to children and adults alike.

Imagination

It is easy enough to maintain when you are young.  I remember spending countless hours building forts that were really palaces, and traversing jungles that sprouted up in my backyard.  I had my own little dreamworld that I visited constantly.  That dreamworld was as real to me as anything else.

Now that I'm older, I forget how long it has been since I visited.  A fact that saddens me.

I understand that, as we get older, reality offers more pressing needs than those dreamworlds.  But do we have to forsake them all together? 

One night, months ago, when my depression was hitting me hard, my husband wrapped me up in a blanket, held me tight, and asked what he could do.  The first thing I blurted out desperately was, "tell me something happy."

Then we escaped together, he and I.  Just for a few minutes.  Suddenly we had a big, beautiful house.  I wish you could have seen it.  It was everything we dreamed of.  Lots of windows, too.  Green yard, lots of flowers.  We had a few children running around, each a better reflection of us, with smiles and laughs that spread easily.  There was a room tucked away with all kinds of pretty things to look at, and a typewriter.  I could stow away there are write all day if I wanted to.  We had food to eat, and pretty clothes, and our children attended Hogwarts.

Maybe it sounds silly, but as Josh painted that picture for me, everything made sense again.  It isn't that I forgot what made me sad in the first place.  It is that I remembered how to make myself happy.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
-Henry David Thoreau

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
-Mark Twain

An idea is salvation by imagination.
-Frank Lloyd Wright

Of course it is happening inside your head... but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?
-J.K. Rowling