By Larry Efird

One of the most rewarding experiences of being an elementary school principal midway through my educational career was getting to be around hordes of children who had unlimited imaginations. I’ll never forget being on the playground one afternoon when a kindergartener abruptly stopped swinging, looked at me, and said, “Do you know what the biggest part of my body is?” Without giving me time to think or even guess, she quipped, “It’s my imagination!”

Surprised and impressed yet once again by a 5-year-old’s worldview and wisdom, I’m not sure I even had time to respond because she started  swinging again as quickly as she had stopped. As I pondered in my adult way the truth that those who demonstrate imaginative thought tend to do better in school and in life, she was back in her carefree world of thought and play.

When our grandson was in kindergarten, he had a habit of prefacing a story with the disclaimer, “I might be making this up…” and then he would continue his story undauntedly without taking a breath. I often thought how freeing those simple words could be when embroiled in a stressful conversation dealing with an ugly truth. Honesty doesn’t have to be put aside to effectively communicate but closed-mindedness should be.

When one loses any sense of  imagination, they begin to see life only in black and white. They can’t see it in color any longer, and oftentimes become cynical when focusing on the truth. I remember an adult telling me after I had innocently shared a creative thought as a teenager that I needed to be more of a realist. I immediately felt unnecessarily vulnerable for having said something “wrong” or  for having been an idealist — and sadly, for being honest with my thoughts.

Fortunately, I didn’t choose to follow that advice then, or later on.  Sure, there are many times that I have had to accept reality and deal with the cards I, or others, have been dealt, but I can’t comprehend how boring or plastic my life would have been without any sense of imagination or self-expression. I also would have had little — or nothing of substance — to offer my students.

As a high school teacher, I loved my content area which focused on words and ideas through the study of literature and language. Through exploring the classics, I wanted my students to experience the joy of self discovery. I wanted them to appreciate the words of a poem and the unique images a writer created, simply by expressing his or her thoughts in an imaginative way. I wanted them to see their own lives “in color” by breathing in the thoughts and words of gifted men and women who used their imaginations to communicate through the beauty of language.

But perhaps the most important lesson of all was to help them build and fortify their own imaginations. Without being aware of this, they were also learning how to think for themselves and not have to depend on others to do their thinking for them.

I recently discovered a gem of a book entitled, “The Educated Imagination,” by Canadian scholar Northrop Frye. It was written in the 1960s, which provides an eerie foreshadowing of our contemporary world 60 years later. In it he said, “There’s something in all of us that wants to drift toward a mob, where we can all say the same thing without having to think about it, because everybody is all alike except people that we can hate or persecute. Every time we need words, we’re either fighting against this tendency or giving in to it. When we fight against it, we’re taking the side of genuine and permanent human civilization.”

Contrary to what some say, a healthy imagination strengthens critical thinking rather than diminishing it. We don’t have to live in a dream world and deny reality to have an imagination. We just have to know when to turn on the color and not focus on the gray tones.

If you find yourself discouraged by weekly domestic tragedies and world crises, try listening to a child for a while. They are the best teachers of imagination you can find. And though they may be making up their own version of their own reality at times, they are ensuring that the biggest  “part of their body” — and maybe the most important one — is staying strong.

Larry Efird lives in Kannapolis.