The imagination keeps the heart young. When the imagination is alive, the life remains youthful.*
John O’Donohue

The more a man is, the less he wants.**
Maxwell Perkins

How quickening is a lively imagination;
When it begins to wain, so do we –
We look after our bodies, considerate of what we feed them,
Why not our imaginations?

David Abram proffers how the imagination isn’t a thing in itself,
Thereby implying ways we might nurture and grow our foreseeing:
That which we call imagination is from the first an attribute of the senses themselves;
imagination is not a separate mental faculty (as we so often assume)
but is rather the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves
beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact
with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly,
with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible.^

Accordingly, we open ourselves by unfolding our senses to
new thoughts, places, and people,
Or we go delve into the unexplored and unknown hinterlands
of what and who we thought we knew, then
noticing what our minds begin to see or ask or construct,
Employing these as further ways of prospecting and sharing and creating.

There aren’t many things I desire in this world,
But an animated imagination is one.

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny;
^Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: Ecologist and Philosopher David Abram on the Language of Nature and the Secret Wisdom of the More-Than-Human World.