Are people with a vivid imagination crazy? I don’t think so, I think that people that have a vivid imagination simply have a gift to think about things that we might not always get to think about. I think the problem is that if you don’t have that much of an imagination, you might just think that someone who does has way too much time on their hands. The fact is that some of our funniest, smartest, and most imaginative people have had vivid imaginations.
If you have ever seen the movie “Freddie Got Fingered” you will know exactly what I am talking about. The movie stars Tom Green, who is certainly the type to go over the top with his comedy. His character is a 20 something who is still unemployed and lives with his parents. He is constantly infuriating his father for his refusal to get a job, and instead sits at home all day trying to write cartoons, and other drawings that have yet to make him any money.
I know that feeling all too well. I know that when I was in high school, and later in college I would prefer to sit around by myself and just observe things, and come up with stories. People thought I was just shy, or didn’t want to do anything. Nothing could be further from the truth, and how do you have time to think if you are always surrounded by people. You can’t come up with anything if you don’t have the time to just sit and think for most of the day.
It takes imagination for people to come up with some serious stuff too. If Einstein hadn’t been able to ponder the workings of the universe, would have ever have come up with e=mc2? Maybe, but I think it would have been a lot harder had he been berated by his father all day, and been forced to be perpetually job hunting all day. Thanks to his creative thinking, and his willingness to think outside of the box every so often, we learned a lot about how our world really works.
How do we come up with great art, and good stories if we are not allowed to spend any time pondering? We need to be able to run wild with our imaginations. Would Alice In Wonderland ever get written were it not for the vivid imagination of the author, and some help from the world around him? Of course not, and we would have been robbed of a good read when we were kids, and even when we are adults. Calvin and Hobbes was a legendary comic strip when I was younger, and the author states that he spent a lot of time just thinking. That’s where genius comes from.
We need to be able to use our imaginations, and not dismiss those with creative instincts as crazy. We all could be called crazy in some ways. There was a great quote in Con-Air, where two of the passengers are talking about how crazy everyone on the plane was, and one of the passengers says “You think their crazy, maybe crazy is sitting in an office for 50 hours a week.” To each his own, that’s all I have to say.
