The limits of imagination

Has someone ever posed a question to you and asked you to use your imagination to come up with the answer? Chances are that if you were raised in the hood like I was, you will struggle with such a question. Well, it’s not because kids raised in the hood – the Katuturas, Omulungas, Kuisebmonds and Tseiblaagtes of this world – have no imagination; it’s because we were raised with a completely different set of imagination than those boys from the suburbs.

Kids from the suburbs have a wild imagination – and so do their parents. Gary, an old school friend of mine, who recently graduated with a Charterted Accoountant (CA) qualification is one such person with a wild imagination.

Ask Gary anything, and he is bound to come up with the most outrageous answer. For instance, I recently sat Gary down and told him I have some news to tell him.

“Don’t tell me….wait, I know! You just won the lottery and the two of us will go on a road trip across the world. We will rob banks, date women and just go nuts. I will change my name to Kiko and I will call you Dudu!

Eish, I was only going to inform him that I bought a new exercise bicycle! Such a wild imagination!

It is people like Gary that allow their kids to have imaginary friends, with whom they do almost anything under the sun with. Our kids from the hood will be staring at the suburbs’ kids in awe as the kid talks to his imaginary friend and even asks them to talk to him!

We had no imaginary friends – it was already enough keeping up with our fake friends who only came around when mommy dishes out the food! To be honest, we didn’t even know back then of the existence of such a thing as an imaginary friend.

Our imagination took us to other places – like actually believing that Daisy, the most sought-after girl at school was ours! Or that we look exactly like Denzel Washington and are the best thing to happen to girls since ‘Bu-Tone’. Ja, those were how far our imaginations went.

Have you ever wondered why kids from the hood back in the day had difficulty understanding science fiction movies like E.T. and others? Well, our brain was not made to explore and actually believe the possibility that a dog could talk, or that a cat could fly!

Show us Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris and MacGyver anytime and we will actually believe that a man can fly through a hail of bullets. That, my friends, was our kind of imagination. In fact, I believe to this very day that nothing beats Chuck Norris – the man is just tough and nothing will get him down.

So, whenever a mother tells her kid, “You can be anything you set your mind on. Let the limits of your imagination be your only guide…”, we always giggled and whispered to ourselves that the mother had no idea what she is telling her kid.

Like, can someone really be anything, and anyone you want to be? At that moment we all looked at Chuck Norris on our TV screens and in unison shook our heads and broke down in uncontrollable laughter. To us, there can only one Chuck Norris.

But living in a world full of trials and tribulations, we are at times called upon to be creative with our imagination. For instance, if your ATM refuses to give you the amount you asked for due to insufficient funds, simply slip the card back in and imagine the money rolling out of the ATM.

In fact a little prayer will help too: “By the grace of the almighty God, God of Moses who helped him part the Red Sea, God of Abraham who held his hand when he was about to sacrifice his own son, please take away any evil cast upon this ATM. I declare and decree that no insufficient funds formed against me shall prosper. I decree that I will receive that N$1000 I seek, in Jesus name I pray…”

If nothing pops out by the time you open your eyes, then the ATM most probably had an imagination of its own too!

Until then…

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