When I was younger, I lived in the fantastical worlds I invented. I told anyone who would listen tales of my family going on adventures to faraway lands and traveling by camel or about my triumphant victories against snakes in my backyard. My penchant for the pretend was so well-known that everyone doubted everything I said, even if it was true.
Now, I have abandoned these dreamscapes for a crushing, cold reality. I spend most of my days navigating young adulthood and college life with the prowess of an explorer with a broken compass, doing loops trying to understand myself and those around me. Though people are constantly changing and personal growth never stops, we do not have to exclusively contextualize who we are in the real world.
We must return to these inner lives lost to our childhoods to truly understand ourselves.
Practically speaking, we are confined to the constraints of our present reality. Time, money and location limit our ability to discover different facets of our minds and selves. We cannot instantaneously evolve into Italian aristocrats or star athletes, nor can we rewind the clock and change what we have done. In our minds, however, the possibilities are endless, and there are no consequences for our actions.
These visions can be realistic or completely impossible — either way, they are valuable in deciphering life.
I often imagine myself in the future, running into various old friends at the airport. I think about what they are doing in their life, who they are with and if they would even stop to talk to me. I ask where they are flying to and if it is for work or leisure. I imagine their reaction when they see me. Do they smile? Do they look surprised? Do they try to look away? I wonder what my updates will be for them if they ask. Am I a hotshot city woman wearing mostly black? Do I have two little kids and a bag full of picture books? Where am I traveling to? Who am I with?
Though this scenario is entirely realistic, it has yet to happen. At the moment, it only exists in my mind. But, it allows me to explore what I want in life and who I want in my life in a less overwhelming way than just asking those questions outright. In ten years, what do I want to be able to tell an old friend at the airport?
Perhaps an even greater test of character is pondering who we are outside the world we know today. If presented with an issue we know as injustice today, whether we are in 1940s Europe or 1960s Alabama, would we stand up for what is right? Do we have the capacity to distinguish what is right from what is wrong without historical hindsight? If we were met with resistance to fighting for justice, would we keep fighting? Taking the time to honestly ask ourselves what we would do in completely hypothetical scenarios is a tremendous test of our actual character. In the real world, we can choose to make these decisions, having already thought about whether honoring our beliefs outweighs the consequences we may face.
Developing a rich inner life is not an escape from societal perils — it is a manner to think critically and come to understand problems and our place in them. Imagination is just an extended thought experiment we can carry with us as we encounter unbearably real problems. No matter how abstract our fictitious lands are, they are effectively an allegory of our own life experiences, even ones that have not happened yet.
To calibrate our inner compasses, we must allow our minds to drift away from reality and consider the improbable and impossible — it is in this space we can find satisfaction because we can truly honor how we feel in the real world.
The people who we want to be in our minds, the kind of people who destroy snakes and traverse faraway lands, exist within us. We can be the people we want to be and surround ourselves with our passions, but we must dream of them first.