average life

It’s not an uncommon situation, I suppose.  When we were kids, our minds bubbled with the sort of imagination usually reserved for delusional schizophrenics: the floor was lava, animals could talk, and the dark was a living entity that if not separated from oneself by a blanket could eat one’s very soul.  As we grow older, of course, the floor becomes a surface for vacuuming, the animals are an underestimated responsibilities, and the dark is a welcome respite from flickering fluorescence.  It’s quite necessary, really.  An almost-29-year-old who is afraid of the dark is severely limited in his social interactions.

In fact, we often become quite impatient when encountering someone with child-like wonder or imagination – either regarding them as mentally deficient or willfully difficult.  Or irresponsible.  I don’t know if it is because we want to be functional in society that we lose our imagination or that we simply don’t have time for it anymore because the functions of society are so consuming.  Or maybe it’s the other way around.  Maybe we are simply lazy.  When we discover that being an astronaut cowboy requires decades of flight training on top of years of ranching experience that four-year business degree starts looking like a better option.

It’s a generalization, I guess, to assume all grown-ups have little imagination.  Sure, there are plenty of exciting grown-ups out there: race car drivers, movie stars, the aforementioned space cowboys, but these are definitely outliers.  Most people don’t even know the president of a country personally or have never pulled off a thrilling bank heist.  Most people are, in essence, boring.

Oh, sure, we’re nice and all that.  We have our interests and our hobbies.  Our lives are quite full, even, as we shuffle from appointment to appointment, making decisions that affect other people and ourselves, but I’ve never played soccer on the moon and I doubt that you have, either.

Maybe interestingness and imagination aren’t exactly correlated, either.  Someone who spends their day doing data entry into a computer may also be hatching elaborate schemes to take over the world, but can’t because they have to generate the quarterly report before Friday.  A dashing model may spend his days hopping from one exotic local to the next but can’t imagine what a zebra would look like with checks instead of stripes.  (Hint: it’d look fantastic.)

Maybe we grow up and we do what the world needs us to do.  The world needs accountants, we become accountants.  The world needs engineers, we become engineers.  The world needs adults, we become adults.  Maybe it’s an unconscious sense of responsibility, after all.  Someone has to balance the lunar soccer team’s checkbook.

Would our life be that much more fulfilling if it were all that more interesting?  True, one will never be eaten alive by zombies if he (or she) avoids playing God with the building blocks of life, but if one avoids it, too, one will never have a genetically-engineered mini-elephant that sleeps on a pillow in the living room.  It’s all trade offs, I suppose.

So, I transfer funds to my savings account.  I load the dishwasher.  I vacuum the floor.  I make sure I have enough sleep so I’ll be productive on Monday.  But I also wonder if you’d have to feed a tiny elephant equally tiny peanuts.  Because where in the world are you going to find those?