This is a response to the one-word prompt “Imaginary” by “The Daily Post.”

What do you see in the world around you? How does your mind work and make of its surroundings? Do you take in all the sights, shapes, sounds, and smells, and try and make sense of them? When you see others interacting around you, do you try to imagine what’s going on and make-up stories, or do you try to understand their story? But most important of all, do you try to understand the story of life and the world around you by imagining the world in different ways? Life is just one big story with lots of vivid and intriguing “characters and sub-plots.” That is I think, why humans throughout the ages have always turned to “great literature to learn about the world. But in order to do either tell a story or have one told to you, you have to have an imagination.

Without imagination we would not have stories; we would not have Tolkien’s “Lord of the Ring” epics or C.S Luis’s The “Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” It is imagination, that allows us to look at the world and recreate it in our minds. Because imagination allows us to recreate the world in our minds; it is thanks to the imagination, that we have the scientific and technologic in advances that we do in today’s world. Imagination allows us to look at the world as it is and makes us think and ask ourselves “how can we make it better?”

So if imagination offers us so much in life; what would the world and life be like without it? What would it be like to go about your day to day activities without taking in the beauty of everything around you or being able to “enjoy” your life? A world and life without imagination are not worth living in. Without imagination, what do we have but the “ugly nity gritty” details of life and the hard work we have to do to get by. It is imagination that lets us to look around all the “hardness” of life. Without imagination we would not be living but instead only surviving; but humans need more in life than just to survive, they need to thrive, to live.