Imagination

I was standing in line at TCBY today and looking at all the little children running around and I wondered to myself if it’s fun to be a kid these days? I think I can count the number of times I played on the computer or TV during my childhood on one hand. Yes, there were occasions when I would sit down with my best friends and play Mario Kart or Mario Party on the Nintendo64 (or Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega), but most of the time my friends and I were making up games and using our imaginations. Some of our favorite games when we were younger were:
-pretending we were orphans and creating an orphanage
-sitting on eggs and pretending we were birds
-playing “The Secret Garden”
-making up/choreographing dances and putting on shows
-rollerblading while pretending to be ice skating
-pretending the ground was lava
-climbing trees
-making up mysteries and solving them

Activities like these really did require so much imagination though. I remember looking at the swing set and being able to clearly picture it as a boat with red, hot, bubbling lava below. I wonder if children these days still do that? Or if the ridiculous amount of technology, iPods, computers, game boys, and other electronics create a world where children don’t have to play outside, interact with one another, or use their imagination? That makes me so sad to think about. I honestly think I had one of the best childhoods. I remember spending days on end waking up at friends houses, playing outside, and then camping out and doing it all over again the next day. I hope that children still find time to go outside and play and use their imagination. “Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless.”

So to the kids who still believe that sheets and pillows can be a fort, or specs of dust might actually be fairies, keep on believing!

PS- when I was younger and we didn’t have iPods, my friends and I would push the radio to the window ledge, open the window, and turn the radio up as loud as possible so that we could skate to music in the driveway :)