Colliding Into Imagination

When I was a kid, like most other kids, I had an imagination teeming with life. My imagination was an extension of reality, becoming reality itself. The stories I would read or create were fabrications of images so familiar and vivid in my mind. When I painted with my finger paints, I was an artist, when I sang into my plastic tape recorder, I was a star, and when my mom let me pull her long brown hair into a ponytail and help her dab on eye shadow, I was her personal stylist. I loathed the idea of ‘growing up’ or losing my imagination in the same way I loathed naps and bedtime—with stubborn indignation.

This summer, I had the opportunity to spend time with my eight year-old cousin as the babysitter. I was reminded of the world of childhood imagination every time she asked me to join her in games of pretend, explaining matter-of-factly that for the next hour we were obviously not humans but dogs and tigers, goddesses and princesses. And to be truthful, I was a little ashamed at how rusty my ability to imagine had become.

But while preparing and anticipating for my next four months in Turkey, I realized that imaginations do not all together disappear when we do ‘grow up.’ Sometimes it takes a child’s imagination to prod ours from their slumber, or maybe it’s just a matter of intentional recognition. If we allow as we get older, however, our imaginations become our key advocates in shaping our dreams. They are the visions and goals that spark the journeys we embark upon.

I have looked forward to study abroad since high school but, thrilled by most of the world and incredibly indecisive, it took a lot of imagination to decide on a program. What would the country be like… what would I be doing there? Facts and logistics helped immensely, but imagination and guesses allowed me to sketch out the rest. Unlike anywhere I had been before, an intersection of worlds and cultures, and pertinent to my studies at Georgetown, Turkey captured my imagination.

And now, sitting on the plane, I am suddenly colliding with the images I have been constructing all year of this whole experience. Looking out of the plane window at the tops of enormous clouds is surreal in itself. As I flip through the pages of my Turkey guidebook, I can’t wait to see how the people and places described might become a part of me.

So it begins—the transformation of the imagined into the tangible, or maybe just this collision of the tangible with what I have imagined. Inevitably, it is bound to shape who I will become.