Albert Einstein said: “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”

How apt and true and whole encompassing. How delicious. How perfectly fun!

If you’ve seen a child submerged in play, you know that imagination is their dress rehearsal for all matters living. If you’ve seen an artist bubbled in their creative space, you know that imagination is the spring that feeds it. If you’ve heard a fairy-tale or folk story, fable, tall-tale, or a Bard imparting lore; you know that imagination is the fertile ground they grow on, what sustains them, where their seeds remain asleep, awaiting a creative dawn.

All that has ever been done, invented, manufactured, built, sewed, woven, Jerry-rigged, cobbled together; it had to pass through an imagination portal first.

We cannot create what we don’t see–if not with eyes or ears or hands or senses, then with our mind and heart and soul. Most true creations call on several of those to form the tapestry of thought to form.

Imagination creates. It is the foundation, the first step before the step is even taken. It is the heartbeat of all progress, in one’s own life as well as in the world galore. It is what makes impossible, possible; what makes the unimaginable, done. Humans are made to imagine. We are made to visit unseen shores within our mind and see vistas unfurl endless wavelets, seashells, cliffs and boulders, shores within a shore. We are made to dream upon an image, find a thread to follow and breathe imagination through it till a light-bulb sputters on.

Imagination “is the preview of life’s coming attractions”, Einstein said. It is the show before the show, the act before the acting, the plan before the blueprint, the background of a story before it knows the words. And it is limitless. The mind’s eye is unencumbered by space or time or speed; it is unfettered by procedures, flow charts, feasibility, or expectations. It is the infinite universe where old-soul-magic and deep-shared knowledge parent images till we find the courage to have them be born.

“Imagination is everything.”

Indeed it is, and in it lays its magic. In it strums the harmony that leaves us breathless, resonates our very soul, and holds us in the mesmerizing imaginary space where we are partially tethered to reality and partially swimming in the spheres of all-be-known.

Imagine, and you will forever be transformed.