Let’s just imagine something. Let’s shut the terrible news for a while. Let’s daydream of a better place, together.
When I was a child, god knows what age, I can’t remember it, I first heard the chords of imagine. A song. A simple combination of melody and poetry.
My father put it on a record player and sung the lyrics on top of his lungs.
Since then, the song never left me, it is tattooed on my soul, and with no doubt, it will be there forever.
Songs, Music, poetry, art, fashion, all the creative magic of this world saves my complicated mind from going insane, and it is a very personal and emotional thing.
When you look at the news, the view is devastating. You doubt that tomorrow will even exist. When you look at social media, in most cases, you won’t get distracted by the world around you, you will get caught up deeply in it.
Creative pieces of work, whether it is written, melodic or visual, show our desires to escape into another world.
A world without mass shootings, war, competition, sadness, depression and all the other dark sides.
Creativity allows us to create our own world full of peace. Everyone has a different definition of it, that’s why it is so diverse. For John and Yoko, a way to change the world was to do a bed sit in all day, for other creative activists was it to go and protest in the streets.
When I first heard the lyrics of imagine and understood them, I felt a deep connection with the song. It was a song that expressed me, without having me to talk. It summed up everything I was, everything I dreamed of and everything I could imagine to be.
I have always been classified as a “daydreamer”, a “loner”. People used to say it so often to me that I started to believe that I am the only person in the world who is like that. Growing up in a small town, that happens very quick. I felt alienated most of my life.
Music, art and fashion was my escape.
Looking back, the very simple lines of “imagine” sum up my personality and my beliefs as a person. For years, that song was (and still is) everything I held onto, it was the spark of hope that I am not alone in this world.
The song inspired me to live my life like I do now, living anywhere, everywhere, it does not matter, we are all one. I have a strong desire for peace, and I believe that all of us would be better off without borders and prejudice based on nationalities.
Living in country number three now, this belief is stuck very deeply into my soul. Once you have lived in various places like I did, you realise how unimportant nationalities are and that they are mostly just a reason to put someone in a certain box.
Every one of us knows certain clichés about several countries, and once we know someone else’s nationality, we immediately assume that they are an example of what we assume to know even though we know next to nothing.
Of course, not everyone is like that, but some people out there on the planet are.
Borders, passports, clichés divide us in times when we should support one another and change the world for the better.
Just imagine how peaceful, how big, and how beautiful a world without borders would be.
Looking back through all the years I have been listening to various artists, no song ever apart from “imagine” had that much of an impact on me. I have been adoring music my whole life and I love how it expresses human emotions when visuals fail. I love how we connect it to certain events in our life, how it allows us to travel back in time.
Some songs catapult me directly back into my childhood home, back on the sofa with a cup of hot chocolate in my hand, watching my father cooking and singing beautiful songs.
The creative arts are mirrors of our human souls, they are reckless, they show every dark, hidden feeling. It is an inspiration to imagine new things, to change.
Just imagine what you want yourself and the world to be,
it’s easy if you try.
Nina xx