Come on baby in our dreams, we can live our misbehavior...

So last night I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and the movie is quite amazing. It is visually stunning with lots of humor, and dance numbers by the oompa loompas :o) Anyways, one of the major things I took from the movie is that as we get older we seem to lose our imagination and creativity. The creativity and imagination that we do posses gets limited by the infiltration of logic, reason, and knowledge. Not that these things are bad, but now everything has to have some property of purpose otherwise it's useless to us.

I remember when I was little I would play with my G.I. Joes and Tranformers, and I'd be entertained for hours all by myself. Intense battles would occur with each figurine personified by my variety of voices, including a number of sound effects that I had perfected over time. Or I'd be in the backyard either alone or with a friend, and we'd have forts, castles, spaceships, and treehouses; that needed no rhyme or reason. We did it because it was fun and we loved it. There were no boundaries! It was a time of imagination and innocence. There was no concept of social trends and culture. No reality television. It was awesome.

Nevertheless, as we get older and become more educated we learn that there are boundaries and limitations. There are unwritten laws that we better be aware of if we want to be successful. We have to grab, pull, and scratch our way to the top, stepping on anybody who gets in the way. We are told what to eat, wear, watch, and drive. All this in the struggle for individuality, which really just makes us like everybody else. What happened to the boy who played with his toys for hours and hours? What happened to the boy whose body was limited by the fence in his yard, but his mind knew no boundaries? I know what happened to him. He's in line over there buying my crap he doesn't need.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love the pursuit of knowledge. I love learning about philosophy and history, among other things, but at the same time I see a great difference in my own imagination and creativity. The ideas are still there, but doubt has risen where child-like faith once stood. In the movie, Willy Wonka creates all these crazy ways to make candy, and there's all these strange contraptions, gizmos, and gadgets, and the reason he created all of these is because he wanted to, not because it would make him more profit.

The apostle Paul writes about how as he got older he put away childish things, but I don't think he meant that we should lose our childlike imaginations. Our minds get filled with such garbage from television and video games that we forget what it's like to create anything on our own. Okay, I'm getting tired so I want to finish this up. I hope this makes sense, but it might not. Either way Charlie is a great movie, and it really just reopened my eyes to some childhood memories that I had long forgotten. Cheers...