When I was eight I told everyone I was going to be a movie star. When I was twelve I was sure I was going to be a Nun.

At seventeen I thought the idea of being a beach comber sounded like the perfect career. Never mind I had never seen the ocean and the nearest beach was seventy miles away on the shores of Lake Michigan. Needless to say none of those aspirations even became reality. They existed only in my imagination.

I am again at it and it is one of the most remarkable characteristic of the human species. With out it civilization would never have come into existence.

Even though science claims to be fact based we still had to imagine possibilities before we could formulate the concepts that gave them a tangible reality.

How impoverished and sterile life would be were it not for the gift of imagination. I don’t utilize this gift the way I did in childhood. And, yet as I write this column I’m looking out at a winter landscape and imagining how it will look in June.

If I try hard enough I can almost smell the lilacs and hear the birds singing like they do in spring. I can imagine myself as I was at seventeen and know just how the ocean must look on a stormy day.

When I listen closely I can hear the voices of the ancestors carried through time and space on the wings of the wind.

Its all fine and good to be programmatic, but give me someone whose imagination allows them to shape shift into a butterfly or who can see fairies where others see only a flock of sparrows.