Imagining

The Gift of Fantasy

“The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”            Albert Einstein

            When I was a little girl, one of my favorite games was missionaries and apes. There were woods in my neighborhood in Chattanooga, and we made extensive use of them for all sorts of fantasy games. In this particular one, the girls were the missionaries who set up a jungle camp, and the boys were, of course, the apes who came crashing in and destroyed it. It was a game of hide-and-seek and chase, and I could become absolutely lost in the fear and surprise of it. Children in my day had few choices in television programming, and what we did have was mostly on Saturday—Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Sky King, and Rama of the Jungle. On long summer days, we played fantasy games outside. We didn’t have a lot in the way of toys, so we improvised. I remember making an entire mountain community in a red dirt bank using Monopoly pieces, sticks and stones; then I became the Realtor and bought and sold property to my playmates. I am grateful that we didn’t have sophisticated technology in those days, or I might never have learned how to “make up a story.”

            Fantasy is so important to developing the child’s sense of play; of using the parts of the brain that are not involved in math and reading and science. Fantasy supports the ability to imagine things we have never seen, to create out of thin air games as innovative as modern art. The ability to fantasize as a child is, in my opinion, a necessary first step to becoming a creative adult—I would bet that Steve Jobs and Mark Zukerberg played active fantasy games as children. And once those structures are developed, they’re available to us as adults. We can revisit our ability to imagine and create, and feel at home there.

            How about you? When you were a child did you have an active fantasy life? How does that serve you now? Albert Einstein imaged the warp and weft of the universe. His fantasies led him to breakthroughs which now form the foundation of modern scientific theory. What will you imagine today?

                                                            In the Spirit,

                                                            Jane