Creating Your Eden

My first grade teacher told me that writing comes from what we see, hear, taste, feel, smell, and imagine. That’s kind of difficult for me. I live in Shanghai, China. I don’t think I would like to write about what I see, hear, taste, feel, and smell.

Try to put yourself in my shoes. You are a seventh grade student attending a private school with rigorous academic standards. There’s no time to rest and enjoy the sunny sunshine, beautiful daisies, crisp clean grass… all these fairytale fantasies that you’ve only experienced in books. Even if there was time, you have nothing to enjoy. You turn your head and see factories billowing thick black smoke into the already grey sky. You see colour fading away more and more by the minute—it feels like your world is dissolving and resolving into a dull black-and-white photograph. But you’re nothing like the environment you’ve been forced into. Sometimes you like to take a break from those heavy textbooks, take out a pen and a bright yellow notepad… and write, just write. You don’t want to write about the misery surrounding you, either. You want to impersonate a carefree girl living by the countryside, pinning flowers onto her bonnet while sitting on a rock near a clear blue stream… You don’t even know how you came up with this. However, if you write from what you see, hear, taste, feel, and smell, you’ll never be that carefree girl living by the countryside—never be able to experience that pure and unadulterated joy, not even in your writings. You see black air. You hear coughs and cries. You taste smog (yuck). You feel miserable. You smell pollution—it’s stifling you and seriously killing your respiratory system. And, yet you don’t want to write anything of this sort.

So this is where the last component comes in. Imagination. Writing also comes from what you imagine. Despite all the dystrophic things surrounding you, you take a moment to think, imagine… create. There’s no rule saying that you can’t immerse yourself in a world you’ve created, thought of, written of.

That’s how it started. I wrote about utopia. I described the sky streaked in warm shades of pink, yellow, and orange. I talked about the tiny hazel rabbit peering out from under a rhododendron bush. I turned on the beautiful music of birds chirping. I wrote about the sunny sunshine, beautiful daisies, the crisp clean grass… And before I knew it, I would lose myself in my own little world that I’ve created with only a pen and a bright yellow notepad.

Really, it doesn’t matter where you are or who you are. Anyone with an imagination can pick up a pencil and a notepad and begin the art of what I call ‘Creating Your Eden.’ After all, no one’s there to judge you… and I guess it’s healthy to sometimes let go of everything and take a moment to relax and fantasize and pretend… something that can only be found in your imagination and heart.