Imagination Is Important

Sara Shaboodien

10 February 2011

Number 13

Imagine

What would our lives be without our imagination? It would be boring, tasteless, purposeless and tiring. Imagine not being able to dream when you sleep, to let your mind wander now and again, to think of your prince charming, that you are still to meet? It would be terrible, I know.

Nobody knows exactly how our imagination allows us to dream things up; it is just one of those things that have to be accepted.

Try the following: Imagine that you are stranded on a deserted island, all by yourself. You are scared, worried, hungry and cold. You walk around for days on end, bananas being your only source of food. Until one day, 7 days after you landed on this island, you stumble across a weird looking tree. The tree had a mystical feel to it, but more plainly, it was blue and had red leaves. You are amazed by the mere sight of it. You investigate the tree and find a small note in there. You read the note and it tells you that you will soon be rescued out of your misery and you must stop exploring the tree. So you start walking back and when you get back you are awaited by someone representing a Goddess. She tells you that you are going to be sent back to where you came from, but with one bad condition. You have to lose your legs, or your imagination.

So what do you choose?

My choice would be imagination. If I had imagination I could dream of things during my hardships with having no legs, I could imagine myself with legs again. I could have hope.

Yet if I had legs and no imagination my thoughts would only be those of mathematical sums and what you are seeing. I would not be able to read books, as I could not imagine myself as the character in the book. I could not get lost in magical worlds.

Without imagination, we would be nothing that we are today. Somebody imagined making smaller versions of themselves, and figured a way- thus resulting in ourselves being on this earth. Somebody imagined having machines that you could document information on, and from there the idea was made a reality, thus computers.

So as you see, without imagination, there is nothing.