The phrase make believe has become especially intriguing to me now that I have three grandchildren. The power of it is absolutely astonishing and compelling. The grandchildren are ages 5, 4, and 2. And they all can do this make believe stuff really well.
What they do not seem to need is artifacts from somebody else's make believe, entrepreneurial and costly as it may be. Disney -- step aside. Barbie -- step aside.
I have a whole cache of fairy, princess, fancy-dancy, and fire chief costumes. What they always choose, in the end, is an old scarf or scrap of fabric, a feather, and some cardboard thing of their own design. And they will it all to work. And it does.
They have created whole worlds of baking, dancing, puppet drama and shows requiring hand-made tickets, curtains from bed sheets, and audience participation without much help from the 99 cent store or the Disney store that I so willingly provide.
What I am beginning to learn is that we all need to create our own reality every single day out of the things that mean something to us and the things that are at hand. We need to let a scarf be our magic adornment, a feather enable us to fly, and a bit of paper become our ticket to a reality that is better than whatever else is being sold out there.
We can make our own heroes, and we actually may even make ourselves into one or recognize that we are already there. We can build cities, farms, parks, gardens, that please us. We can grow lollipops or rainbows or giant scary slime creatures. Whatever we need.
We can do it. If you can imagine it, it can happen. After all -- somebody had a dream about going to the moon. Didn't we do that? I still have a hard time believing it could happen again. But I will keep make believing which is, after all, just another way to dream.
