The Never Ending Story

The children of the 80’s will of course remember the Never Ending Story; with Bastien and Atreyu and his horse Artrax and no one can forget Falcor the talking dragon.  I wonder though if any of us really remember why we loved that movie, it was a fantasy story, an adventure story. It took us into this cool other world for a little while.  But why did we love it?  I loved it because it was about a boy reading a book that turned out to be a real other world.  It was everything I ever wanted from a story, for me to find out that that place was real and that I could have an impact on the outcome.  But as an adult realizing that that concept is ridiculous I love it because it was full of imagination.  It is the perfect capture of an 8 year old’s mind as he or she is making up a story.  It’s everything I would like to believe I could create one day.
The problem being that it gets harder as you get older to exercise that creativity.  It’s as if the real world has sucked dry our ability to pretend and turned us into adults.  Gone are the days of make believe and fantasy, here are the days of “don’t waste my time” and “Did you pay the mortgage?”  Sad, I think, to know we once were creative passionate children who have turned into unimaginative lumps focused on the realities rather than the fantasies.
I challenge anyone reading this to do something creative this week, or next week or in the next six months.  Just remember you weren’t always this serious, you weren’t always this boring.  Life turned you into this person but you can get scared in the dark and hide under your covers because you imagined a huge flesh eating monster lives under your bed.
Ahhh the good old days 🙂