The Power of Imagination
“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.”
I was listening to Krista Tippet interview fabulous author Jason Reynolds the other day and he said something so beautiful and true that I had to sit down in the middle of my walk.
“In Senegal, when someone dies, people say, a library has burned.”
This reminded me of the vast library that is every single person. Of the potential that lives in the unique, weird, vast imaginations of every single person. As the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress, Jason's mission is to encourage the awesome beauty, sophistication, complexity, and humanity of a child's imagination and it's potential to build new worlds, to "set things right"—after hundreds of years of so many things being so very not right.
He emphasizes how important it is that we attend to and feed our inner libraries by getting out of our comfort zones, talking to people who aren't like us, allowing the curious mind to wander. The imagination has the power to save a person, and make a far better world.
I needed so badly to hear this from Jason when I was young. When I was a kid, many of the adults in my life told me that I lived too much in my imagination. To get my head out of the clouds. Imagination wasn't bad, but it was pretty much a waste of time. Not useful.
I was not encouraged to cultivate it—and no one connected the dots for me about the awesome potential of one's wild and weird imagination, one's inner library, to make the world a better place. But my imagination still served a certain kind of wisdom.
As an only child, I spent hours, entire days, in my bedroom, door closed, in my la la land. (It was often a pretty fantastic la la land.) And while I was lucky to live a safe and relatively happy childhood, I did experience a few traumas and I've no doubt it was my imagination that both protected and saved me. At first, it was simply to escape. And later, it was through my imagination that I was able to dream and build a different life for myself. In other words, my imagination allowed me to create a new lived narrative.
Here is an extreme example: The City of Joy the women in the Congo imagined for themselves after suffering unspeakable traumas. Imagined, then built.
So I'm with Jason Reynolds on this one. Let your imagination rip.
. . . P.S. Jason Reynolds wrote one of the few books that I read aloud to my kids and husband that captured everyone's attention in that page-turner, please-don't-stop-reading kind of way: the middle-grade novel, Ghost.