The imagination can be such a powerful tool. It can take you on exciting adventures or whirlwind you around enough to knock you off course.
Although we all have the ability to close our eyes and dream of the most amazing, fascinating escapades and ideas that drive us to create music, art, literature, technology and innovation there are moments in life that force us to focus our abilities elsewhere that are not ideal to our curious nature, or in some cases our imaginations can run away from us leaving us feeling overwhelmed and lost.
Here I will help shift our direction towards 3 positive ways the imagination can expand your world.
Let’s start with one of the most notable: music – we all listen to some form of music, one way or another. Learning to play an instrument can open up many different possibilities and avenues for the imagination to grow. I can tell you from personal experience that learning to play guitar helped in so many ways when it came to creating and writing.
Music can also help you escape. Put on a pair of headphones and you’re somewhere else, maybe an old memory, a trip you’d like to take, a loved one, you name it.
Test drive this one day: make a day just for yourself or with your family, attend a concert, put on your favorite band, or better yet pop in Frozen and watch your kid(s) dance around pretending they are Elsa or Anna with the brightest of smiles as they sing their little hearts out.
Another way is through art - We all know some sort of artists, from Picasso to Rembrandt, to your local street artists and the finger paintings from your child you’ve hung on the refrigerator door.
Art can especially help expand your world, literally. From painting an under-the-sea adventure in your child’s room to sitting outside in a park drawing trees in charcoal.
Try attending an art festival or a local gallery, challenge yourself to see what the artist saw when they created that piece. If you have kids an art museum is a wonderful day outing to expose them to the creative arts that were fuel by the power imagination. Show and encourage them that they too can create with their huge imaginations.
Like music and art, literature plays a very important, if not the most important role in expanding our world. The words in a book can whisk us away on a great pirate adventure or a romantic medieval journey. A writer puts together mere words in black and white, no visual effects, colors, special effects/CGI or any other form of stimulation save for the readers own imagination to put together the adventure laid in front of them. They give the best description they can and while we read WE begin to add those effects and colors like we are watching that week’s box office hit.
Some of the best literature can even inspire some of the best stage performances in theater. Take in a Shakespeare play and you will see a story come to life right in front of you.
Whatever the case, our imaginations are essentially limitless – at any age.
From the person drumming on the steering wheel to their favorite song pretending to be onstage with the band, to the child holding a paper plane tossing it as high as they can pretend to be a Starfighter from their favorite space odyssey.
In the Jason’s Imagination series, I chose to showcase how the imagination can be used in the most positive of ways.
We follow Jason through his own insecurities and fears, much like my own growing up, and how strong those fears, insecurities and anxieties can be, but with your chin up and your head held high you can find yourself immersed in a wonderful, colorful world of strength, excitement and triumph, and can just about overcome anything.
About the Author:
Jason Edwards is a Houston native now living in San Antonio. With a passion for utilizing his imagination from a young age, Edwards decided to write his first children’s book, Jason’s Imagination: The Rain King, based on his own experiences as a child.
Available at www.jasonsimagination.com or see the entire collection at www.amazon.com/author/jaseedwards
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