Anticipation & Imagination

I was looking at the front of a cereal box and noticed the enticement Magic Compass Decoder.

Cereal boxes contained all kinds of great things when I was a kid too. Whistles, magnifying glasses, decoder rings, and more - all sealed in a paper pouch.

I had impatient friends who would empty a newly opened cereal box into a mixing bowl so that they could get to the free prize right away. I sometimes envied them (my mother would have had a fit if I had done that). But looking back, I realize such hastiness lowered the value of the prize.

Those friends lost the excitement of anticipation - wondering if this would be the day the paper-wrapped prize would poke above the top of the remaining cereal. They also lost out on all the days of imagining what uses the prize could be put to.

In these days of instant gratification, perhaps we would all do well to revisit our childhood and rediscover the value of imagination.