Where Imagination Waits

I can't tell you when it happened. Just that one day, I noticed my imagination was gone. There was no warning. No goodbye. I didn't know I was doing certain things for the last time—playing without a point, wandering without a destination, making up worlds just because I could. Endings rarely come with a soundtrack. They slip past you, and you only see them once you're looking back.

That's the odd part of growing up. We're told to keep our eyes on what we're becoming, almost never on what we're losing. Progress gets sold as a stack of more—more skill, more certainty, more grip on things. Nobody mentions that you can put down parts of yourself somewhere along the road and forget where. Curiosity. Wonder. The quiet ease of imagining something without asking permission first.

Lately I've been thinking that imagination isn't something we own. It's more like something we step into. A way of being, a way of thinking that moves through us when we leave the door open. It doesn't need to be unlocked so much as remembered. It doesn't actually go away when it goes quiet. It waits.

When you're a kid, imagination doesn't feel like a skill. It feels like weather. You move through it without noticing. It doesn't call itself imagination—it's just how the world works. You ask questions. You make up reasons. You follow a thought because it's interesting, not because it's going to get you anywhere.

I remember spending whole afternoons believing the patch of woods behind my house had a door in it somewhere. I never found one. That wasn't the point. The looking was the point—castles in the clouds, oceans where the sky should be, gardens that burned without burning down. None of it had to be useful. It just had to be mine.

Somewhere along the way, that gets harder to reach. Not because it disappears, but because we're taught to stand differently in the world. Look for outcomes. Justify the time. Trade wandering for efficiency. Imagination, in that shift, starts to feel like a luxury. Optional. Something you either "have" or you don't, like good cheekbones or a sense of direction.

I'm not sure that was ever true.

I think imagination is less a possession and more a posture. Open. Attentive. Willing to stay with a question a beat longer than you need to. When those conditions go missing, imagination doesn't pack up and leave. It just stops talking. Adults aren't really asked to notice that silence. We're praised for being certain, for being fast, for delivering clean answers on schedule. There's not much room to think out loud, to follow a thread without knowing where it ends, to let curiosity set the pace.

And still—every so often—it comes back.

In moments when your guard is down. In grief. In illness. In the kind of awe that makes you forget to be polite. In the places where control loosens its grip and you're forced to listen differently. Imagination comes back not as a fireworks display, but as a way of standing. A sense, again, that more is possible than what's in front of you. A reminder of how you used to move through not knowing. Which makes me wonder if the work isn't to "be more imaginative." Maybe it's to remember the conditions where imagination feels safe.

The version of me that exists for other people's comfort doesn't need imagination. That self is built to be readable, agreeable, easy to slot in. I figured out early that new ideas don't usually get applause. What gets applause is being smooth, being agreeable, not asking too much. Curiosity and imagination aren't passive—they have weight, they interrupt things. And when they aren't welcome, they don't fight. They just go quiet. Whatever they might have grown into slips out of view.

But imagination has never been loud. It doesn't announce itself or ask to be seen. Its strength is quieter than that. It shows up as orientation, not escape—a way of thinking that loosens what felt fixed and opens space where there didn't seem to be any. Imagination doesn't overpower the world; it changes the way I move through it. It softens the urgency. It sharpens the looking. It reminds me that there's more here than what I've been told to accept.

Maybe imagination doesn't disappear. Maybe it just goes quiet, and waits for us to learn how to listen again.