While growing up, I’d never really considered how important it is to be imaginative. It’s a childhood profession, you could say. It comes naturally. Then we hit an age when we’re presented with a scantron of bubble-in options, a template for a CV that we need to create, and Excel. At that point, our learning has to fit into certain parameters: within that little bubble, within the one page limit, and within a tiny digital graph. So, what happens to our imagination?
It seems to fade.
Being Asian (as I am) doesn’t help. The assumption that you’re more apt for engineering or medicine is like a nagging tail. We have a so-called fondness for numbers apparently. If you’re Asian, you must be good at math – of course.
Well, then I turned out to be an oddball. I developed an affinity for words and images instead. At the age of 12, my dream was to be a professional doodler, which could turn into a career as a cartoonist, if it went well. And my parents indulged me in that dream. Unlike others, who may have thought that was ridiculous, they got me drawing books. When my mother saw me sitting idle, or falling asleep among a pile of school books, she’d suggest, “Why don’t you draw for a bit?” Over a decade later, little has changed. She still chuckles at my drawings, tells me to draw more often, and has preserved that notebook.
Perhaps, I should have continued with that path. Last week, a friend sent me an email with a job listing, titled Doodler. Ridiculous, I thought. But then I saw the employer – Google. Not so funny anymore but actually a possibility. And truly, Google is hiring a doodler for the images that often appear on their homepage to celebrate holidays and momentous occasions.
As I grew older, as the reading list of books grew longer, the assignments tougher, and jobs took up any spare time as a student in college, that ability to just sit down and pour your imagination onto a blank canvas began to disappear. Rather, that creative side had to reinvent itself.
My high school history teacher once told me that history is not a timeline; it’s a story. She threw out the linearity of history. She made what was dry and ancient, charming, engaging, and at times, even humorous. That was her imagination at work. And it helped me develop a love for the social sciences. Our imaginations can be quite contagious, I learned.
But can this love for the imaginative ever find a place in the real world? Certainly.
More and more young people today want to work for start-ups where business meets creativity, where what may seem impossible today is reality tomorrow. Who knew that you could pay for your Starbucks coffee without cash or credit card? You can. Just scan your Starbucks card from your smart phone. Who knew that you could get a treadle pump for under $40 that can help farmers irrigate in the developing world? Just look at the work of entrepreneur Paul Polak. Who knew that we’d be talking in just 140 characters in the 21st century? Perhaps, the folks at Twitter did.
Imagination creates not just fairy tales and children’s books but a new vision for the way we conduct our lives. Imaginations challenge the norm, push boundaries, and help us progress.
Unfortunately, that imagination is getting sidelined in classrooms, where the emphasis has been on grades and testing for too long, in workplaces, where the prominence of excel sheets and powerpoint presentations has become a daily chore.
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We need to encourage more creativity. Forget the CV for a bit. Forget the obsession with grades.
If we encourage that brilliant math student to be imaginative as well, he could use those algorithms to innovate. If we encourage the biology student to be imaginative as well, she could design a new sustainable fuel source for us. If we encourage that economics buff to be imaginative as well, he could build a new people-friendly business model. The tools are there. You just need to reorient them towards the unexpected. That’s where creativity – at home, in the classroom, and in the workplace- is so essential.
That’s why, last week I found myself, sitting with my mom late at night, rereading Shel Silverstein’s poems for children. Turns out, they’re just as good for adults, maybe even better.
FROZEN DREAM
I’ll take the dream I had last night
And put it in my freezer,
So someday long and far away
When I’m an old grew geezer,
I’ll take it out and thaw it out,
This lovely dream I’ve frozen,
And boil it up and sit me down
And dip my cold toes in.
This post is reprinted here with permission from the author. More from Esha Chhabra, a journalist who focuses on innovation, social enterprise and tech-driven initiatives for development and social impact. She writes for the NY Times India Ink blog, Good Magazine, Inc Magazine, and other platforms.
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love the article!! :)
Awesome article! thx! It helped me with my academic piece of writing.
thank you all for the kind words, really appreciate it.
let our imaginations be reawakened!
Thank you. Diane DiPrima wrote a poem called "Rant". In it she repeats, over and over, "The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it." Imagination is our ability to empathize, to relate, to imagine our selves in someone else's shoes. It is essential for compassion. And it is under attack. Thank you for celebrating it. May we all do the same!
What a wonderful article. I read this in a room where my Disney stuffed animal, "Figment" rests on a shelf behind me and an empty coffee mug with little cermic feet sits by my side. You helped reinforce that it is absolutely ok for me -for everybody- to embrace both that adult side just as much as that fun, imaginative side. It doesn't have to be separate at all. Thanks for such a refreshing read.
Off I go to get out my box of Crayola crayons, paper, pens, and my imagination! Oh, thanks for the reminder that we're not too old to dream and imagine.
One of the saddest experiences I have had was presenting a holiday music program to a group of children at a disadvantaged local school. My whole program was based on .. dreams and imagination. Should be easy with a group of kids I thought. Wrong. The simple question, "Do you have a dream of something you would like to do?" met with blank stares. "Do you imagine what it might be like to fly?" Nothing. These kids had no idea. It seemed they had no dreams. That one hour program was the hardest I've ever got through. A whole classroom of children with no dreams! Kids who didn't even know how to imagine.
I was so depressed by this experience, that I went home and immediately began to write a song for the next school I would visit. It developed into a children's song which I taught to a group of children in a YWCA in-school mentoring program that I was involved with. We recorded it at a local high school, it was played on our community radio station and it featured as the backing for a promotional video which the mentoring program still uses. It was called "When I Dream (I can do anything)."
The words I used to introduce the kids to the idea of dreaming and imagination were these.
"Nothing has ever been created, no masterpiece painted, no song given voice, no discovery unveiled, without someone, somewhere, who had a dream."
[Hide Full Comment]Janne Henn
this write up made think about the creative childhood of mine which I have decided to dust it new
Oh yes....let's pretend1
Walt Disney taught me an elephant can fly, and a little wooden puppet can wish upon a star and become a human boy. Some time along the way, most of that good stuff was lost by the wayside. I want it back !