imagination or lack thereof

Our little girl, Olivia has to be the most entertaining thing in the world. I find myself mesmerized by her imagination. I mean she'll just sit there and entertain herself for hours. It's just funny to watch her and to listen to her have a different voice for her doggy and her kitty and her turtle and so on. She'll just create conversations between them. Or it's funny how sometimes she won't eat or won't do this or that but if I create a voice to be her caterpillar or her monkey and tell her to do the same thing that daddy just told her to do, she'll do it (not sure if this is a bad thing or not). Or her new thing is to talk about the snakes or ants that are coming to get her and then we proceed to run through the house as they chase us. Or the "cute dinosaur" pet that she has. It's just crazy because you really wonder, does she see these imaginary animals? Does she hear them talk? What does it feel to have that kind of imagination? And the question I keep asking myself is, when did we lose this imagination?

At what point in our lives do we lose our child-like imagination? I mean, what causes us to lose that imagination? And as I search for the answers to these questions, I can't help but wonder, what would the world be like if we still had the imagination of a child? How many more things could we accomplish if we let our minds wander and we didn't set limitations on what we could accomplish?

Or perhaps that type of imagination for adults would lead to nothing more than us all having our imaginary friends to keep us company? Perhaps you'd randomly see grown adults running down the streets from an army of talking snakes? I mean how fun would that be? We wouldn't need TVs to entertain us because we could sit and play in a box all night and be content. We wouldn't need to waste all of this money on "big toys" and instead would find ways to use blankets, cereal boxes and rope to become MacGyver and build an entire town.

Sometimes I wonder if life would be better if we all had the imaginations that we had as kids. Perhaps there is a way to get imaginations back...if we could only figure out how we lost them in the first place...