Chesterton

We can't help but fall into a ritual, no matter how simple, of day to day life. It is simply beneficial to our health and well-being to be able to find recluse in the well worn necessities- sleep, sitting down for a meal, commuting, laundry. This tasks are so menial and silly, yet take up most of our waking lives. Picking up the clothes from the floor and making the bed seem so unnecessary when all of my work will be undone in a matter of hours by none other than myself. But some of these things we simply cannot escape. Many individuals, raised on the belief that a mid-sized SUV and 9-5 job will bring success and happiness in itself, find themselves drowning in these inescapable chores. Sometimes they aren't even chores. Sometimes they are just situations, conversations that we find ourselves in repeatedly. How many times can you go to a party on a Saturday night and drink a few beers uncomfortably in a corner? This is supposed to be the climax of the week! The reason you worked for hours beforehand- to reward yourself with some relaxation. But even these moments, pregnant with expectation, can seem worn-out and thin. They lose their meaning because, honestly, you can't help but repeat yourself over and over in life. It is simply impossible not to do so. This is the cue for feeling a terribly empty sense of doom coming over the horizon. Life is like a coloring book. In itself, it is, or oftentimes can be, completely meaningless. It is up to you to fill in the blanks, give it color, movement and emotion. You have several mediums to work with- religion, work, love, family, adventure. All of them serving as different pens, pencils and paints, at your own disposal to change your outlook. Your life can be nothing, or it can be everything all at once. It all depends on how you choose to make it. It can be filled with moments so banal as waiting for the light to change, pouring the milk out of the carton and changing the sheets. Or you can use your imagination, fill them with excitement and novelty. The novelist Chesterton divulges his definition of the imagination as "not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settle things strange." Whenever I ride down hills on my bike and catch a glimpse of my coat snapping behind me in the wind, I imagine that I am a roque wizard flying stealthilly through a modern civilization, oblivious to my mischevious presence. Driving my car over the winding mountain roads, I lose my will power to the brute mentality of a stampeding ram, tumbling around bends and scurrying over hills. Here is an excerpt from an article I read about Chesterton:

"Most of the inconvenienes that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences- things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm, of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys' habit in this matter. They also serve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen."

As we grow older, many of us shed our imaginations. We figure it is not real and therefore it is no longer useful to us. Who are we to make a final ruling on what is real and what is not? And as children, our imaginations were just as real to us as the dog bowl or our dinner napkin, so why should that change? It would be completely useful to us, in my opinion, to stimulate our imaginations despite our age. Next time you walk into the kitchen to prepare that sandwich you have been eating for months on end, why not transform that butter knife into an ax that you delve into an enemy soldiers, or loaf of bread's, side as you defend your Kitchen homeland from the ruthless invaders of Hungary. (har har, get it?)