Matthew van Maastricht

My dearest boy,

The other day we were building a village in the living room with magnet tiles, and wooden blocks, and boxes. The village was for your toy insects, and the stray elk and tiger, but mostly beetles and millipedes, grasshoppers and praying mantises. I was amazed at your imagination. What I saw as a little cardboard box, you saw as the basic building block of “Pizza Xtreme”—a pizza place that could make a pizza in any shape: ants for the ant-eater, meat for the tigers, grass for the elk, and so on. And what I saw as just a little a-frame made from magnet tiles, you turned into a mansion with pillars—because rich people have pillars around their houses, as you told me.

You have an imagination that I cannot even fathom. I’m sure I used to have a good one, I have fleeting memories of imagination as a child, and I also remember it getting me in trouble at times—particularly in school.

Losing imagination as one grows older is such a common literary theme that it almost seems like it’s a law of nature. And yet, I don’t think that there’s anything in us that requires us to lose imagination as we grow. We gain responsibilities, our lives become busy, more stressful, and our efforts turn from play to the business of the world. And yet there is such a need to escape from the business of the world. Some do it through stories and movies to bring them to different lives and sometimes different dimensions; some do it through music that raptures their hearts and souls to otherwise unexplored heights. And someone has to create those artistic works, after all. So imagination itself does not disappear as we age.

And yet, for me, for some reason, my imagination stagnated. It was an unused muscle that atrophied nearly out of existence. Perhaps it was my desire to grow up too quickly, my felt need to be world-wise—to take on too much responsibility too early thinking that I could handle it. And I could, but being able to handle something and being able to flourish are different things (I still think I’m learning that, to be honest). But whatever it was, I don’t have that kind of imagination anymore.

And so I told you, “I love your imagination, bud. And playing along with you helps me to grow mine again too.”

And you looked at me and then closed your eyes and rocked back in the chair you were sitting in and said, “there are islands in my mind. Lots of islands, infinity islands, and I pull things from there, to make this village. And every day, those islands grow with more things.”

My dear boy, the islands in your mind—it’s a beautiful image—are amazing. Whatever you do in life, always be sure to keep an eye on those islands, don’t let yourself drift from them. Imagination is such an important thing, and you don’t realize what you’ve got until it’s gone.

My dear boy, the islands in your mind…keep your eye on them. And for right now, I will keep learning from you, exercising my imagination muscles, and maybe grow them back, and maybe even glimpse the islands in your mind.

Love,

Your father