If you think back to your earliest childhood, you can see yourself peeping out of a pram and looking at a large lovely garden with soft green grass, filled with butterflies. Here and there over the grass stood beautiful flowers like stars. There were trees bearing rich fruit. The birds were flying about and twittering with delight. Children were playing hide and seek just before a rosy sunset. And the upper circumferential edge of the sun was disappearing and setting below the horizon. Or your parents were playing peekaboo with you in the evening. And you were giggling. Or your beloved mother changing your nappies at the wee hours of the night. And you were rubbing your eyes in disruption of your sleep, and now looking at your affectionate mother’s lovely face.
Is this memory or is this imagination?
The above images as I described might appear from one’s most vivid memory. And Memory is a great tool for a writer but it should never be confused with imagination. The power of imagination is immense. One’s imagination delivers the images one thinks about.
For example, you are sitting on the bed placed under the window and looking out at your garden. A delicious perfume is coming to you through the open casement. Imagine a white lion or Oscar Wilde’s selfish giant has come down from the mountains and is approaching your garden moaning and groaning. And the simple childhood game hide –and-seek has taken now a 360-degree turn. Being dreadfully afraid the cheerful children were running away from the grove, screaming out hearing the eerie howl of the lion or the very gruff voice of the giant. It seems the lion or the giant would soon catch them.
Now you jump out of the bed and look out. What have you seen? Imagine. Someone is lurking under the bushes? Or a stranger comes to the rescue. Let your imagination flow by asking what is going to happen after that? Then your imagination is always there for you if you watch through the window until it is frighteningly closed.
Everybody has imagination. Everyone. And you may also be motivated by the lyrics of the popular song “Imagination” written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke in 1940 and finally sung by Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan: Imagination is funny/ It makes a cloudy day sunny/… Imagination is crazy/ Your whole perspective gets hazy/ Starts you asking a daisy/ What to do, what to do.
Therefore, trying to build a picture in my mind using my imagination to have the beginnings of a story!!
Asking myself the question: Is the event of climate change is a memory or an imagination without or with a paradoxical fact like that the children has now nowhere to play. The beautiful garden is inundated with waters. They try to play on the road, but the road is very dusty and full of hard stones, and they do not like it. And what they perhaps don’t see is- the anthropogenic aerosols in air.
Farid Ahmad