El Poder De La Imaginación

Picture this: You live in a small town of less than 30,000 people stuck in the valley of a South American mountain chain. Your access to the outside world is limited. After all, your television only receives two public channels and they only broadcast eight hours a day. People don't travel much where you come from; they don't have fantastical stories of foreign lands and adventures. Your world is the breadth of the 15 streets of your town.

One might naturally conclude that a town like this would be a boring, mundane place to grow up. But, in fact, it was actually quite the opposite for me. Without stories that began with "In a land far, far away . . ." our thoughts and imaginations turned inward to our own little corner of the world. Town elders--who throughout human history have always been the ones to pass stories down through the generations--used the 400-year history of our sleepy little town to create myths and legends of ghosts and spirits and fantastical creatures. Throughout the years, they found a way to make this humdrum place into an incredible land where frightening and extraordinary stories took place. This town created something for itself because the lives of the citizens were stimulated by their imaginations.

That is what surrounded me as a child. Old men with pipes and walking canes who told legends of crying, childless female ghosts by the river, whole scores of wandering souls protecting the cemetery, spirits rising from the lakes in the form of playful children. I grew up with myths that had developed and changed over centuries of being told; where the house that I walked by on my way to school was not only Doña Maria's home, but also the backdrop for a legendary story. Every road, every street lamp, every wall was part of a tale reaching back generations. Everything I was surrounded by was more than it seemed; everything had more than just its physical existence.

Tangible things like books and movies provide tools and inspiration for the development of one's creative side, one's imagination. But it is imagination itself that transforms words from print on paper to the buttery flakiness of a croissant and the cold metal of a chair in a French café, or the sting of a strong wind on your cheeks at the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. It is the imagination that has the ability to take mere words and turn them into perceivable emotional and physical experiences, allowing you to trick yourself, even if just for a moment, into believing you exist in another world.

Raised in a community so strongly rooted in storytelling, my imagination was deeply nurtured and has since influenced everything about who I am as an adult. Working professionally as a musician and filmmaker was the natural progression for someone whose creative side had been so strongly cultivated.

But beyond the fantasies of a small boy in the mountains of Colombia, what is the point of having an imagination?

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