(28) Thirty Days of Grateful Praise: Imagination

Imagination is a wonderful thing. It enables you to see things that others may not see.

There’s no way I can describe in just a few paragraphs just how essential my imagination has been to me (even to my very survival) but I really can’t end my Thirty Days of Grateful Praise without mentioning it.

No need to rehash it here, but my childhood was difficult in many ways, and I cannot tell you just how many times I found refuge in the realm of my imagination.  I was often called a “dreamy” child, but it wasn’t so much that I was dreaming, but that I was inhabiting an internal world that was infinitely more friendly and easy to live in than the tumultuous world outside my head.

I go there often, even now, though I’m no longer a defenseless child.  It’s still a pretty wonderful place to be.  Imagination is a place of such unlimited possibilities; you are not limited by what you see with your eyes.  Because sometimes what you don’t see is even more interesting than what you do.

With my imagination, I am never alone.  It’s a lively and often entertaining place.  Several  years ago, I wrote a post where I compared the thoughts that constantly go through my head to the cars of a runaway circus train.   Almost anything I see or hear will inspire a constant parade of images in my mind.  Just recently, for example, I was reading someone’s account of the vacation they’d spent on a farm.  She wrote of just how much her children enjoyed getting eggs from the chicken “coupe”.  Which, of course, should have been chicken “coop”, but thank goodness it wasn’t because the phrase chicken coupe triggered the most delightful image in my mind of a couple of well-dressed chickens tootling down the road behind the wheel of their lovely chicken car.  The rooster was wearing a bow tie and fedora; the hen, a flowered hat.  Poultry in motion.  The image made me laugh and laugh.

And now I’m imagining that you’re laughing, too, because you’re envisioning your own silly images of chickens in a roadster.  And I can tell you that imagining that makes me very happy, too.

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