Don’t watch the world go by, use your imagination
The water whished over the rocks below creating a gurgling sound as I sat dangling my feet off the bridge. I was just high enough above the water where if I could stretch out as far as I could I still couldn’t touch the water but I dreamed of the day when I would be big enough to do so.
As I sat there I counted the leaves that floated beneath the bridge imagining that each one was a ship heading out to an adventure at sea.
It was early enough in the fall that the whole fleet wasn’t setting sail beneath me.
There was so much imagination that filled my childhood. I would move from one imagined adventure to another filling my days with sword fights, gun battles, cavalry charges, and Indian skirmishes. If I had managed to gather a few comrades in arms, we might manage building a fort, stocking it with pinecones, and then take turns setting off with a huge offensive to capture it.
When I tired of war games, I would move on building things, damming up creeks like a beaver, digging holes that were big enough for a root cellar, gathering up fallen logs to build a cabin façade, pretending that I was on the frontier.
I was blessed to be able to be a kid, play like one and have the environment where my imagination could run and I was allowed to explore and experience what I held within my head.
Today, I see so many youths who are tied mentally to a chair with their imagination being dictated to them by whatever game is coming across their television, their computer or their phone. I am sure they find the adventures just a stimulating as I did but theirs is created by the imagination of game designers and they are simply taking trips in someone else’s imagination.
They sit there idle as they ask to be fed by someone else’s imaginative situational adventure.
Same is true of the adults who await that next movie, TV show, or sporting event to take them away for a period of time, rather than creating something themselves.
I really think God provided us a mind so that we will use it to create, entertain, invent, and find ways to make life more amazing.
So much time and energy is lost in pursuits that probably do not inspire others in that direction but simply feed an appetite for diversion — that is, entertain me. Our mind wishes to be filled by others, rather than doing it ourselves.
I applaud those of you, who use your time and energies to create, engage, encourage and change the world around them.
If you have not tried it in a while, there is no better time than the present. Pick up your pen, start writing that story you always wanted to write; what about that thing you always wanted to build, you should try…. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
