Libraries poring over theoretical tracts about the declining importance of.President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.The Importance Of Imagination In Adults. The formation of such images: a childs imagination of monsters.Keywords: bureaucracy, violence, simplification, ignorance, imagination. The ability to form mental images of things that are not present to the senses or not considered to be real: The author uses her imagination to create a universe parallel to our own. 5 hours ago iВ·magВ·iВ·naВ·tion (-mj-nshn) n. Imagination definition of imagination by The Free Dictionary.

Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world's largest Gryffindor reunion.Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. Want to encourage your child to be more creativeThe first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. Creativity and imagination can help your childs motor skills, social interactions and even his problem-solving skills.

Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.I have come up with two answers. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today.

You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.

Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all вЂ“ in which case, you fail by default.Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.

Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.

Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense.

Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries.