Capturing imagination?

Capturing a child’s imagination’ is a contradiction in terms, just think about it.

Imagination, by its nature needs to be free, untroubled, like a wild horse on the prairie. To capture this implies that you intend to stifle it rather than free it with stimulation.

Imagination needs to be fed by randomness, adventure, space, openness and freedom, not captured and incarcerated.

I’m sure the intentions of people who use this phrase (Capturing a child’s imagination) intend to free the mind of our young people through books and other stimulations, but we need to be careful with language and how we use it. 

Show them the potential of the mind is limitless, if we allow it to be, and this should apply to adults as much as children.

One of my hero’s Spike Milligan wrote his first novel, ‘Puckoon’, about a mythical village in Ireland, without having ever paid us a visit. Using his vast imagination he got it right in a zany sort of way and then maybe not?

The great revelation in this book, for me, was how the main character argued with the author. The best part, to me, is where Dan Milligan complains about his legs and demands a better pair be written.

To a child everything is possible including what society considers as ‘Normal’. Unfortunately in ‘Capturing a child’s imagination’ we guarantee they will be ‘normal’.

Society needs to be challenged, the ‘Trumps’ ‘Kenny’s’ ‘Merkel's’ of this world need to see a new way, a road where everyone is seen as equal, yet different at the same time. We need the wider society to respect this difference and allow it to develop for the benefit of all. 

We should all be equal in our difference but respected for it.

Just look at the people who have helped society most, Martin Luther King, The Wright brothers, Marconi, Edison, Graham Bell, Einstein amongst others. They were all strange in their own way but free thinkers.

These are some of the well-known ones but what about those who are less known who dare to think of a cure for cancer, dementia and other diseases, are they not free thinkers, they need to be if they are to succeed and enable change.

These diseases and others will eventually be cured and we will travel around the world a quickly as a bus can bring us into town but not if we fail and ‘Capture Imagination’. we need to allow free thinking in our children, keeping it free all through life.

A genius is a child who keeps learning but never grows up (Anon)

 

Grab a thought

Mull it over

Play with it

Change it

Turn it into an idea

A possible solution

To a real problem

JC-Dublin-A City that allows 'Imagination' to roam free