What is Imagination?

The wonder of imagination is lasting and what I remember from those days when I was a child, children atrociously outshine in this act of marvel and curiosity. This also I say from my own yarn – that the world is crowded with tight-lipped and non-jumping glorious adults so we all grow up to shrink to that sameness. Unimaginative and severely strict to our own selves!

So, when C.S. Lewis wrote a note to her godchild Lucy, while he was writing Narnia, he must be imagining a child still alive in, by then, older Lucy; her old, forgetful uncle will be waiting for Lucy to come and talk to him about the story he wrote for her. This is what he wrote –

My Dear Lucy,

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But someday you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be

your affectionate Godfather,

C.S. Lewis

What is Imagination?

It’s the architect who asked, why do buildings have to be square? The poet who asked, why do words need to line up on a page? The activist who asked, why are we not all free? The scientist who asked, when was the universe born?

– Kendra Sand, What is Imagination? Three Perspectives

Kendra Sand further adds, “Imagination is the fulcrum of big ideation, it’s the creation of worlds, visions, or ideas beyond the visible. Creative potential beyond the constructs we often accept in day-to-day life.”

Art is Imagination in the Context

We imagine based on what the world presents to us. It has a context.

It is addressing the question – ‘how the world is versus how we want the world to be?’

What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen. - Le Guin

Thus, when artists imagine they are making our cracked world come alive before us. They imagine so we can envision with them and recite it in our everyday lives. We may have to gather the courage to see from our mind’s eyes a more spacious world that sets out to redeem our authenticity and creativity from the grip of a hyper-digitized, overdosed world.

That is the purpose of imagination. It brings strength into our overstimulated-diluted form of living.

The Lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle rippling music. And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, Chapter Nine, The Founding of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.

My writings are also my imaginative process sent to you -from one person to another. Harbouring the beauty of life in words, hoping that you are doing good, sitting under the fan, bending o’er your phone, shaking that right leg and reading through.

And till the time you let me in this auburn-filled afternoon, I will gently tap on your shoulder to remind you to gaze outside your window in a world of constellations and broken stars, where angles take a stroll to reimagine the world with us and we have heaven waiting for us.

I also hope in my creative imagination that you will benefit from Delights of the Ordinary Newsletters, prodding to think; to create; to imagine and to live a life with tiny specks of art in our otherwise art-deficient lives.