Imagination and longing

I have been looking at all the small children who live around here getting ready for Halloween. There must have been parties at school because there were a lot of spooks and goblins and fairies and supermen walking to school on Friday. It was a wonderful procession. And last night, coming home on the streetcar from downtown the car was full of adult versions of pretty much the same thing. I hadn't expected that but I guess they too were going to parties.

I am not sure why adults like to dress up but I get the feeling that for children it is, in some sense part of the journey of discovering who they are or who they might like to be or to be like. It seems to me that children are really able to get into the part that their costume suggests and their imaginations transport them to anywhere and anyone they like. For the adults, I presume it is just fun and there is no real imaginative sense that they are what their costume is. (I say 'presume' because as an adult I have never liked putting on costumes and would do anything I could to avoid it.


But this whole thing about imagination - raised most recently by my great-niece Michal - brought me one step further towards thinking about what part longing also plays in our lives. As children as we live in our imaginations and they have free play, do we long for the things we imagine or long to be the thing we imagine? I think I am making a difference here between wanting and longing. I see longing as a much more powerful emotion. At difficult times in my childhood I can remember longing to be an adult though I know now that my imagination led me to long for an adulthood that was pretty unreal. Oddly too, I do still remember longing to know God and that for me, was a gift that I think is still with me. Those are things that are quite powerful memories for me.

But as adults what part, if any, does real, serious longing play? Do we long to be loved? Do we long to learn to love? Do we long for health or to be different or to be younger or older? Do we long for God even when we don't know what or who we might be longing for?  or ... do we long at all?  

But it also occurs to me as I write this that there is another part to the whole question of longing - if we long for something, do we set out to achieve it or do we just long...? If the latter I suspect it feels pretty futile after a while. So maybe the whole issue of longing also involves being open to the journey to satisfy it. Just as imagination is meant to result in some new depth of creativity, I wonder if longing isn't part of moving forward.