imagination station.

When I was younger, I remember thinking that all the other kids were losing their imaginations. And I decided I NEVER wanted to lose the ability to make believe.

Kids these days (man, I sound like an old crank) have forgotten how to use their imaginations and instead immerse themselves in media. I have sat in groups of people and taken a moment to look around and everyone has their smart device out, missing a chance to socialize and make memories. We are so concerned with documenting the memories as they happen, we fail to let the memories occur.

Disclaimer: I love social media almost as much as the person next to me. I mean, come on, I blog, tweet, insta, snap, pin, and use Facebook regularly. But when I am hanging out with people, I have started to make it a goal to connect with the people around me without being glued to my phone or iPad.

To this day I love reading. It is a prime example of a way to test your imagination.You can be transported to other worlds and come up with the images in your head of what it looks and feels like.

I remember times when my sisters and I would build forts in my living room with blankets, hair clips, and chairs. It would not be a shack, but rather a fortress that is bigger on the inside than the outside. We would play in the back yard, and the ground would become lava, and there would be a secret button on the gate that put a bridge out letting you cross.

We would play orphanage, a favorite, where one of us would be the orphanage lady, and the rest of us would try and escape, running away. (Our image of the orphanage lady was of course related to Ms. Hannigan from Annie.)

My cousins and I would play mermaids and sharks in the swimming pool at Grandma's house.

My younger sister and I would be secret agents with code names in the back yard of our third house.

The memories from those times were the best. And we didn't make memories from sitting around watching television all day. Rather we used our brains and came up with games to entertain ourselves.

And coming back to reality from our imagination land, we could appreciate the little things even more. We are blessed with what we have, and coming back from the orphanage, we can see how nice it is not to be yelled at to clean and scrub every second, and how nice it is to have loving parents. We can come back from working in the field as an agent, to a simplistic life where our problems are minuscule and do not threaten the existence of the world as we know it.

Your brain is like a real life Imagination Station from the Adventures in Odyssey.