Remember when an old cardboard box could be anything: a spaceship, a tree house, a dark tunnel, a robot.  Children would sit for hours entertaining themselves by making up imaginary friends and towns.  My father made up games and changed the rules to suit his mood or the day.  Now, however, with our high-tech, over-stimulating world, simply losing oneself in a book’s plot, becoming the characters, is almost an extinct occurrence.  The effects are horribly tangible.  Since the imagination is directly linked to our critical thinking abilities, people are less and less able to find creative solutions to even the most basic problems.

Recently, I witnessed a group of business leaders in a training session who were given a task: build a house out of the sticks on the table.  They stood perplexed, and one finally asked “Where are the directions?”  In another situation, I watched college students avoid answering all questions on a test that had to do with what they imagined happened to the main character in a story. 

When do we lose our ability to imagine?  Babies still imagine.  They play make believe and find creative ways to get the toys they want.  They giggle at nothing and turn inanimate objects into best friends.  Somehow along the way, in the race toward an advanced world, we have forgotten that it is the imagination alone that made our world possible.  The end of the planet will not come with the launching of bombs.  No, it will come while we are chasing down the imagination we so sorely neglected.