I sit on the couch sometimes while my daughter sits in the bathtub. She never wants to get out right away once all the required cleaning is done. As a parent I take the brief respite with a sigh of relief, my fellow parents will understand. I might rot my brain by scrolling my phone, listen to music, sit and stare at nothing, exhale in the stillness.
The only disruption is the child’s voice in the bathtub with her toys, the conversations and scenarios are utterly fascinating and despite my desire to disconnect I am sucked into the latest happenings of the bathtub social. What always makes me laugh is the complete randomness of imagination and how completely vested and present she has become to that reality, a world created completely in her head. The gambit of emotions and imaginary characters embodied in the bath toys are families, fathers, friends…..sometimes they are strangers, sometimes the Elsa toy is actually Elsa, sometimes the Elsa toy is the father or her friend from school, and sometimes both in the same bath session.
The pliability of imagination, how quickly it creates these worlds and scenarios is amazing to me and I find myself jealous that she can quickly lose herself in this fictional world so completely……but didn’t I have that once? Of course, where did it go, how and when did I lose it? Why does growing up sacrifice that imagination and creativity? Does it just disappear? Does it get channeled into other things? I guess maybe it’s a bit of both, or maybe part of the inevitable curse of getting older is that during those years we push so hard to be an adult we turn our backs on the purity and joy of childhood imagination only to realize decades later that it was not something we needed to suppress but hold on to.
Many will say there are creative outlets of imagination that like our minds and personalities evolve and still utilize our creative engine. Just because we don’t pick up toys and have them converse about a dragon living on top of the waterspout doesn’t mean adults have fully abandoned this part of life. Is not cooking, painting, dancing, drawing, even some aspects of our jobs needing of creativity? Authoring a book requires imagination. What would a person who doesn’t feel creative or do any of those tasks listed above say? Or what would I say to them when they said, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body?”
“Do you dream?” I would say.
Case in point last night I had a dream that was completely random. Tom Cruise was in it; his shoulder was hurt so he was standing there holding his right shoulder with his left arm. He was standing up against corruption of some sort, I can’t remember, but he was saying that he would do whatever it took, whatever the cost to expose them even if it meant everything he had. But dreams are a lot like rainbows, they disappear, become hazy the more you move away from them. Dreams can be as vivid as any real-life experience, we swear it happened and that we will never forget, yet 20 minutes later our mind has lost that particular rainbow forever. We wake up in the morning only knowing that we had a dream, we might even know if it was entertaining or not so much, but most of us, despite our best-efforts can’t remember a damn thing that happened.
Why Tom Cruise you may ask? Maybe I saw a commercial or billboard for his new movie. Maybe deep in my brain I have seen Top Gun so many times that when my imagination reached deep into the well that was just what it pulled out. The funny part is perhaps the only reason I remember even these few things about the dream was because I woke up and jotted down a note for this little post I wanted to write. Otherwise it would have just simply disappeared.
And then of course we can discuss the dark side of imagination, the side that makes us worry constantly as we go from a pain in our side to a terminal diagnosis despite no medical knowledge of our own. We preoccupy ourselves with fantastical and horrific scenarios about our lives, family and everything in between. That is imagination, a dark rainbow we might say, disappearing just as quickly, replaced by an ever-grimmer hypothetical. Same with dreams, for some of us dreams fluctuate between the good and the unbelievably bad. I can go deeper into dreaming, perhaps that’s for another post down the road but for the sake of this let’s say most of us have at least a 50/50 split between good and bad.
Again, maybe our imagination really doesn’t go anywhere, we just forget how to use it in the best ways, let our adult brain use it for less that savory purposes. But is it simply growing up? Or is it the endless barrage of apocalyptic news and information flooding our brains through our phones? Perhaps it is, perhaps it is shaped by our experiences and how we were raised, polluted by the world around us, years of contamination flooding into a pure imaginative process.
The brain is resilient, flexible, it can be changed, repaired, trained, and harnessed. I will not say that it is easy and it most definitely will take a lot of work and time but its possible. Over time if we work at it we can find those bright rainbows again, the joy of unadulterated imagination and creation purely for the sake of it and not for some means to an end or profit, job task.
Learn from the children around you, watch them create with no agenda, watch them create rainbows and join them. For those who say that is silly and childish I would say you are missing out. Stop worrying about what others may say. Lean into that imagination, the young minds around us can help remind everyone of the joy to be found in creating scenarios and people purely for fun.
Next time you are in public and a child tells you the floor is lava or the cracks are dangerous, play along…. don’t worry about looking silly. I promise you that without realizing it you will start to smile as you connect with something long forgotten. And if you don’t have kids act silly with a loved one or a friend, hop and skip down the street or make a silly face. Enjoy the rainbow while it lasts, don’t let it disappear without at least trying to steal a glimpse of it.
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