Childhood Imagination

Now that I am in my very early twenties, I sometimes catch myself reminiscing about the past two decades. I know it is only one and a half decades' worth of memories I could reminisce about. Nevertheless, two decades' worth of memories is something which just got me wondering.

When I was younger I was able to play pretend with my toys and now it just seems incredibly silly for no apparent reason whatsoever. Just like always I just wonder what exactly changed. The change may seem incredibly obvious now but back then… not so much.

On my trip down memory lane, I wondered what I did in my free time. Turns out, I just sat in the living room and pretended that my teddy bears were alive. Together we share tea and gossip all day long without a worry on our minds.

Now I can only laugh about my younger self since I know that my teddy bear doesn’t drink tea, doesn’t eat biscuits and most importantly isn’t alive. However, whenever I see that aforementioned teddy bear, I can remember the good teatimes we had and the gossip we shared.

Back then every day was a continuation of an already existing storyline in the life of the teddy bear. I would make up their friends, their enemies, what they do all day, and the challenges they face together. It was like a completely different world.

When I was playing, I can remember that I can see the world I made up for my toys in front of me. The living room transforms into the world in my mind. Every street, every house, and every store is in that world. What was amazing is the fact that I never left the living room.

Even as the toys changed over time, from teddy bears to Legos to cars, the whole schtick is still the same. Each toy had its friends, enemies, and storyline. They even have fully fletched out personalities and backstories. Likes and dislikes. Everything.

If I can be honest, none of it made sense. The stories and their personalities. None of it. Each toy's motivation is unclear and their actions most of the time didn´t make the most sense since they liked to overcomplicate the simplest of things.

Whenever I think back to it, I can´t imagine what exactly kept me occupied all day. There is nothing truly keeping me with those toys besides my imagination. So, the question now is if my imagination just changed or if it disappeared.

I can still remember that I was in year 5 when I slowly stopped being so overly childlike. In comparison to my peers, I was a late bloomer so to say. I was still hung up on toys while my peers moved on to electronic gaming devices.

To a certain extent, I believe that peer pressure was partly responsible for the shift towards more grown-up topics. Society also expects you to be grown out of certain habits as well since certain habits are deemed childish.

Therefore, I speculated that I didn’t lose any imagination since it is just repressed. However, that doesn’t quite explain the shifting interests since I don’t believe that others are truly the reason why I don’t have this childlike imagination anymore whenever I see my toys. At least not in that sense of the way.

In another article, I wrote a bit about my relationship with talking to myself and I realized that I used to do that ever since I was a child. However, back then it was more open and more freely while now on the other hand is more repressed and silent.

Back in my golden childhood years, I didn’t only spend my time playing pretend with my toys. Back then I had imaginary friends who would follow me around while the rest of the world isn’t there to listen and or understand.

Talking to those imaginary friends made my, sometimes gloomy, days brighten up just a bit. However, if I should do that now, people would automatically assume that I am living in a delusion. Talking to people who are not there. That kind of behaviour is classified as crazy.

After a while, the mere existence of imaginary friends just feels awkward. In those teenage years, there are some things that you don’t want anyone to see even if that person is your best friend and lives in your imagination.

This slowly made the imaginary friend die. Not because I lost my imagination or because society deems it childish but simply because there are some things, we like to keep secret. Without tending to the imagination, life afterwards just gets dull.

Even now learning about everything I desire, I still believe that I had more fun in my past. It might be the rose-coloured glasses or memory falsification but back then my imagination was more colourful than it is now.

I believe that it is partly at fault because we learn about reality and our childhood imagination in the clouds just slowly gets grounded in reality. It isn’t necessarily anyone´s fault that we lose that childlike imagination it is just part of growing up.

The thing is that after a certain age we just understand more as well. We learn more about complex topics which our childhood brain couldn’t possibly comprehend. We see the world as it is and not as we imagined it.

On a technicality, when we grow up, we are also get exposed to the fact that the world doesn’t revolve around us. As a baby, nobody understood the concept of others. Just what is me and what is not me. As we grow up, we slowly learn about the concept of others.

Knowing about those others and having certain embarrassment that one wants to keep secret, I believe that we shut down the imagination to make really hard times just a tad bit easier. It is just easier to deny imagination than to be judged because of it.

As a teen, my imaginary friends turned into an imaginary audience who watched my every move, judged my every decision, and listened to my every conversation. They are just everywhere even though you don’t want them there.

Sometimes it just feels like being the centre of attention even though you are not. During those years, I just built up these walls so nobody even that non-existent audience could get through. I crawled into a shell and kept to myself to avoid… everything.

Just like any teenager, I wanted my peers to like me, and I wanted to be amongst the “popular” crowd. I wanted so much for my teenage self because I thought that I was being watched and judged. But I wasn’t. Nobody was.

However, just like how I find my toy phase incredibly silly now, I recognize that the aforementioned audience is silly too. There is nobody there. It is just me, myself and I. Slowly, I come to terms with the fact that I am putting myself through hell because of that audience and it is just not worth it.

As it turns out the audience never leaves but over time they just become quieter or we learnt how to ignore them. What I sometimes forget about that audience is that they still live in my imagination. So, in a roundabout way, I don’t believe any sort of imagination is lost on this growing-up journey.

You now may be wondering why I constantly fear that my imagination is lost to the passage of time. Why you just spent some time reading about my story and my speculations. To a certain extent, I just needed an excuse to let myself figure out why imagination is so important whether childlike or not.

For children, imagination is important because it builds many valuable life skills that many children need in the future for instance social skills, self-confidence, intelligence, and so much more, vital to the healthy development of a child.

Now as a part adult, most of the things that imagination develops have already been developed so why is imagination still so important? Mostly because imagination still influences everything we do. From what we think about all day to what we create. Its influence is everywhere and is still vital.

There are many articles online which list all the reasons why imagination is important to adults and children, but I wanted to figure out for myself why keeping my imagination alive was so important to me and I believe that I figured out why.

Life is just so much better with imagination. I don’t know about you but with a little imagination, I made sometimes the worst of days into a colourful evening. Everything is more fun just with a little imagination.

Imagining a cool alternate future or something that you always wanted but never existed. Anything you can imagine. How cool is that? Being able to imagine is a powerful skill that needs to be cherished to the end of time.

However, most importantly, imagination improves problem-solving and keeps the mind sharp. Imagination just helps to think outside the box and encourages a different unconventional solution to an issue.

Sometimes I just fear if I lost my imagination my life would get significantly worse. It would limit my creative side and dampen my problem-solving skills. I just can´t help but imagine what a life without imagination would look like and the world I see scares me.

In the past, my imagination is also what made me stand out from the crowd. Back then, I didn’t want that but now that I am growing older every advantage I can get is only by standing out of the crowd and that is what I plan on doing. Without imagination standing out just seems so much harder.

A life without imagination would be pragmatic and logical. Nevertheless, it would be incredibly dull. Sometimes I do endorse being pragmatic and logical, but the extent of the pragmatism would be overwhelming and turn a colourful life into a black-and-white shadow of it.

And as it turns out seeing everything in black and white is not the best way to live life since nothing is ever black and white. There is always more to it than the clear-cut straightforward explanation of everything.

Without imagination, there would be limited innovations and new ideas. If nobody thinks outside of the box, how could we ever break out of it and develop our newest technology and improve our lives?

I know it is completely illogical of me to let a near impossibility scare me like that but I just fear that I could lose myself in work and by doing so I could lose so much more. Long story short, I just don’t want to live in a world without imagination, whether childlike or not.

Nevertheless, imagination is also the main culprit for all those worst-case futures I could imagine. So I guess I am a bit confused about this whole imagination dilemma. Without imagination, I wouldn’t be able to imagine the worst nightmares which could become reality.

Maybe just like everything else in life, imagination is only good in rations. It is important to balance out imagination. Too much of it and you may be considered to be crazily delusional. Too little of it and you may be considered to be boringly dull.

What I am trying to say with this article is that just because my childhood imagination is lost to time, it doesn’t mean that I will no longer possess any sort of imagination. Just that the imagination, I possess has changed its shape and form to better fit into my life.

Therefore the lesson of the day would be that just because something is different than what one was used to in the past does not necessarily mean it is lost. It just means that it has changed. That change is not necessarily bad either, it would just take time to get used to.