Imagination

Have you ever wondered, what would our world be without our imaginations? The ability to think up things that were considered impossible or crazy at the time has brought us the things we take for granted today. The ability to dream has brought us so much, from flying machines, to cellphones, to satellites...
But what's more than just advancing our world, it has brought us stories. Wild tales of pirates and aliens and
fantastical long-agos. Magical fairytales glowing with pixie dust, battling with dragons, flying with eagles. Stories that take us with a flip of pages on journeys through time, warping in starships to another place, meeting other species, visiting other planets. The colorful words that take us to see the splendor of the white tower of Gondor, its banners caught high in the morning breeze... the visions of the forest territory of the warrior clans...
Not all on paper. Some stories are thought up and brought to life on a screen - we travel to fascinating Coruscant, we sit by the lake on Naboo, and we battle to an unfortunate end on Mustafar.
Swords clash, lightsabers woosh, phasers scream and daggers fly. Our air is alive and thick with blurs of action and heroism, our leaders stand tall as victory kills are performed.
We marvel at the bravery of a young girl who stood up to a larger threat: a handful of berries that brought it all down. A young creature who's painful journey full of trials and tribulations and times when he just wanted to give up die came to an end, as a ring was cast into a firey mountain and evil was destroyed. And we were there every step of the way.
We felt their pain. We burned with the girl on fire, we left home with Frodo, we endured with Sam. Loved with Anakin, flew with Peter, discovered with Lucy, died with Rue. Our hearts and these stories are as one.
We are always young. We see these stories with a child's mind, and therefore they will never be just stories to us. They are us, they are our childhoods and our lives, they are real. We don't want to grow up. Bare life is so boring and uniform. Our imaginations are fleeting and beautiful, the way out of a unified life. We are not the same. We each have our own adventure, and our own world. To create beauty and adventure in our minds so that we can escape from the harsh molds of today's world. To make stories that teach values and immortalize the true things of importance in life. Never giving up, standing up for a righteous cause, enduring for the sake of the greater good, finding ourselves, good prevailing over evil, someday things will look up and this too shall pass.
We write to fight the growing uniformity of our world, where school does more harm than good. Where it mechanizes children, drills them until they are abusing their bodies and minds to keep up, rather than showing them the beauty of learning. This struggling to make it through leaves us ill-equipped to take on the world. Being given the great stories will teach us more of value than anything. In this age of electronics and perfection and harder faster better, give us books and movies, give us stories and we will survive as an able generation. Through timeless tales, whose settings and characters are different but values are as important in life, we will change the world. The odds are ever in our favor. We will never grow up out of them, and we will keep the stories that were our dreams, lives, safe-havens, retreats, and teachers alive. We will educate the world through these.
Thanks to imagination, the beautiful swirls of words will always exist. However, they have a greater meaning. Through these meanings, we as a society will live long and prosper.