The Power of Imagination

Having always struggled a bit with staying focused on one task and wondering if  my excessive imagination really had a place in the world, it was with great relief that many years ago a well-respected composer once encouraged me to use my imagination to envision new music. He said it was the dreamers who made the most difference in the world.

I am not always sure, however, that he was right. It seems as though we live in a concrete world where our daily lives are simply steps toward fulfilling the objective that is presented. We go about our lives doing the necessary things to meet our basic needs including food, clothing, shelter, companionship, and meeting our calling in some kind of profession. For a student, it is a matter of following the regime of school including classes, studying, and extracurricular activities. For an adult, we tend to live in a type of survival mode of taking care of the business of life from auto insurance, to taxes, to medical needs, meals, families, homes, paying bills, putting fuel in the car, using a smartphone and a computer, answering correspondence, fixing the garage door, painting the porch, watering the plants, and the list of chores continues ad nauseum.

But few if any of these activities require great imagination and, in fact, may be detrimental to creativity and to dreaming. The more we deal with the mundane, the more it becomes the norm, thereby eroding our creativity and our imagination for a different kind of existence. Not unlike the characters in Plato's Cave, who accepted the shadows as the reality and were unable to associate the shadows with real people, we are in danger of living in a world of specificity and pragmatism. As a musician, the more I dedicate myself to the precision of the music in order to be a performer of the highest order, the less creative I become. We tend to sacrifice our human subjective emotional dreams in order to accomplish those tasks requiring less imagination. I, furthermore, have to wonder if our entire educational system is a massive corrosion and eradication of creativity and imagination. Education is about the essentials, the necessities, and, perhaps, that is right and good. Maybe we should be about teaching the necessities and minimizing the non-essentials.

After all, we are about the business of life, teaching life skills, health, cognition, problem solving, respect, contributing to society, honesty, scholarship, communication, and many other things that are essential. But I am not talking about the essential, I am talking about using the imagination. I am advocating using creativity, to dream, to alter the current reality, to go beyond the concrete and enter the abstract. We are to become agents of our imaginations and seek after those ideas that are not easily obtained and to enter the realm of beauty of abstracts and the subjective.

Obviously there is a balance we need to achieve in education and in life as we go about the daily business of living. But in our efforts to survive and to help others meet the essential needs of life, let us not forget the power of imagination in reshaping our world and redefining what it means to live a life of joy and beauty.