"Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality"

Imagination is not an escape hatch but a lens that sharpens the contours of what is already there. To imagine is to attend to reality so intently that new patterns, hidden continuities, and latent possibilities come into view. The hermetic fantasy that shuts the world out is a misuse of the faculty; the living practice is the opposite: it draws the world in, tests it, rearranges it, and returns with proposals for how to live.

A scientist imagines a structure no eye can see and designs an experiment to meet or refute it. An urban planner imagines a street without traffic deaths and then alters sidewalks, timing, and laws. An artist reframes the everyday so that its neglected meanings become visible. A parent imagining a child’s fear can respond with the right steadiness at the right moment. In each case, imagination is a method of inquiry, a disciplined speculation tethered to verification, empathy, and consequence.

Engaging reality requires more than registering facts; it requires asking what they could signify, what they might become under different arrangements. This is the work of moral imagination as well: to picture the experiences of others and to project outcomes of our actions beyond our immediate vantage. Far from anesthetizing us, it makes us more porous to the world, more responsible because we can foresee, more hopeful because we can conceive alternatives.

There is a difference between fantasy that denies the world and imagination that contends with it. The latter submits itself to friction: constraints, history, other people, the stubbornness of materials. It thrives on revision. It is less an escape than an instrument for returning, better equipped, to what is hard and real. When imagination engages reality, reality becomes more legible and more pliable; the given is not merely accepted but interpreted, contested, and remade. In that sense, imagining is a rigorous form of attention, and attention is the first step toward change.