Boxing Day

Packing boxes is always a tedious task, but only a few times in my life has it ever felt heart-wrenchingly sad—the times when moving heralded future uncertainty: moving from a home or helping a friend pack up to move away. While packing this week for the summer, those feelings came back. They came not from an inability to visualize the future, but from an inability to recollect the past.

I used to look at a box and see a toy: It was the jumping-off point for inventing, coloring, and story-telling. As an adult I see a box as a chore. It has to be packed, taped, carried downstairs. This morning, I saw a box on my carpet and saw myself as a child and as an adult—and then I saw a much sadder reality: Amid all the stress and responsibility of “adulthood,” my imagination has slipped away.

Something about the bumps and bruises we get as we age critically injures that mysterious part of our brain that lets us marvel at the world. To me, having an active imagination means maintaining a certain willingness to suspend disbelief, to act entirely on impulse without any self-consciousness: As a child I was never ensnared by inhibitions or concerns about how my behavior would look. And my worldview was completely different. The very mundane was full of possibilities—sometimes terrifying ones—and I was never bored.

But because discussing one’s childhood always feels intensely personal, the quiet death of adventure stories, talking animals, and palpable magic feels like an exclusively personal phenomenon. Yet experiences of imagination-loss and general disenchantment are rampant.

A slew of recent popular movies has taken up the theme, from gems like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” to less sterling efforts like “Garden State” or “Along Came Polly.” They all share a common plot device: A practical, reasonable adult is rejuvenated by the childlike antics of some zany individual—because, of course what used to be imagination or creativity is called “zany” or “quirky” when you’ve grown up. Still, at least Hollywood recognizes that there’s an imagination-sized hole in America’s heart.

The best way to identify imagination-loss in my peers is to see their response when someone dares to deviate from the sensible adult behavior we’ve adopted. You can try it yourself: If you want to play freeze-tag, build a fort or play make-believe, how many of your friends want to play with you? They’ll probably humor you in a tongue-in-cheek way, covering their discomfort with phrases like, “Wow, that’s random!” or, “Oh, you—you’re so quirky.” Or, if they’re drunk, maybe they’ll play along.

Those absurd and whimsical games which, growing up, were products of impulse alone, now seem like calculated ways of getting attention. How does this happen without our noticing? Perhaps the imagination, like baby teeth, just falls out in pieces and is replaced with something more permanent. Maybe the mélange of hormones that drown a body in adolescence takes no prisoners and leaves no survivors. Whatever it is, one day spaceships turned back into boxes and the monsters moved out of the closet.

Losing this capacity to fantasize is conceptually heart-breaking to me, but it’s not a cause one can rally to. For one thing, how could adults face the dull stress of a work day, the pain of lost love, or the reality of warfare if our imaginations were still as free as children’s? And not even the impending summer is recess enough for the grown-up mind, because Harvard is not the problem, it’s just one step we’ve taken towards adult seriousness—imagination was just a treasure that we packed up on the way.



Sarah C. McKetta ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is an anthropology concentrator in Winthrop House.