The Magic of Imagination

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

- Carl Jung

 

The good thing about education is that it teaches you what stuff is.  The bad thing about education is that it teaches you what stuff is not.  For example, a chair could be just a chair.  Or, it could be the iron wall of blanket fort.  A stick on the ground could be just a stick. But it might be a magic wand that could call faeries out of hiding. One of the beautifies of children is that they have not yet had possibility educated out of them.

                  

If you don't know what something is, then it could be anything.  If you don't know what someone does with their lives, they might be capable of anything.  "Knowledge," wrote Albert Einstein, "will get you from Point A to Point B.  Imagination can take you anywhere."

                  

Maybe it's because children have so recently come from The Mystery that they haven't had time to pigeonhole everything.  They haven't had time to figure things out or even assume they can figure things out.  They haven't had time to be taught the concept of impossible.  Having so recently come from the timeless Mystery children haven't had time- clocks and calendars - dictating their thoughts and actions.

                  

We have each been children, of course; and life has been gracious enough to us to leave a fragment of our fertile childlike imagination in our dream world - where time is not in control, and anything is possible.