You have to really use your imagination to refresh your daily

"You have to really use your imagination to refresh your daily life." Thus spoke Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, the philosopher-storyteller of our age, whose words bridge the worlds of thought and feeling. Beneath their simplicity lies a truth older than time: that the imagination is not merely the tool of poets and dreamers, but the fountain of renewal for the soul itself. Life, with its routines and repetitions, can harden the spirit into dullness. Yet the one who dares to imagine—to see wonder where others see weariness—discovers that every day can be made new. Schmitt reminds us that to live well is not only to breathe or labor, but to keep alive the sacred fire of curiosity and vision.

From the beginning, humanity has been sustained not by food alone, but by imagination. It is what lifted the first wanderers to look beyond the horizon and wonder what lay beyond. It is what turned stone into art, silence into music, and survival into civilization. But in the modern age, when the world’s mysteries seem conquered and the mind is burdened by routine, we often forget this divine faculty. We let habit rule us. We wake, we work, we sleep—and in the midst of abundance, our souls grow poor. Schmitt’s words are a call to remembrance: that even in the most ordinary of days, the imaginative spirit can breathe eternity into the moment.

Think of the painter Claude Monet, who stood before the same pond in his garden at Giverny day after day. To others, it was merely water and lilies—unchanging, ordinary. Yet through the eyes of imagination, he saw infinite variation: light shifting like emotion, color whispering like music. From that single scene he painted hundreds of works, each a revelation of how the same moment can be endlessly reborn through perception. This is the essence of Schmitt’s truth: that we do not need to flee our lives to find wonder. We need only refresh our vision, to see with new eyes the world we already inhabit.

For imagination is not escape; it is transformation. The fool dreams only to flee reality, but the wise dreamer uses imagination to redeem it. To imagine freshly is to take the stale bread of routine and turn it into the feast of meaning. The mother who weaves stories into bedtime, the worker who finds poetry in the rhythm of his tools, the student who envisions a brighter world through study—each is an artist of the soul. Through imagination, they bring color to the gray, and spirit to the mechanical. As the ancients taught, it is not the gods who make life divine—it is man’s vision of the divine within the mundane that sanctifies existence.

Schmitt’s wisdom also carries a warning: when imagination dies, the heart begins to decay. Those who live without it drift into bitterness, for they see nothing worth cherishing. History has shown this again and again. The tyrants of every age are not merely cruel; they are unimaginative. They cannot see through another’s eyes, cannot envision a world different from their own hunger. In contrast, the great reformers—Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt—were guided by imaginative compassion, the ability to dream justice before it existed. Thus, imagination is not only the painter of joy, but the architect of change.

Even the smallest act of renewal begins in imagination. To greet the morning not as repetition but as creation; to speak to others not as strangers but as fragments of one’s own story; to notice the beauty of a leaf trembling in wind—these are the quiet revolutions that sustain the soul. The world does not grow weary; only our eyes do. The task, then, is not to escape our daily lives, but to refresh them—to see them as sacred, alive, worthy of wonder.

So, my children of habit and hope, heed this teaching: do not let the grayness of routine dim your inner light. Each dawn is an unwritten page; each task, an invitation to creativity. Use your imagination as a lens, and the world will bloom anew. When you walk to work, imagine you tread through a living story. When you speak, imagine your words as seeds of kindness or truth. And when the day seems dull, remember that dullness is only the failure to see.

For Schmitt’s wisdom is eternal: life is not renewed by circumstance, but by imagination. The heart that dares to reimagine its world will never grow old. So awaken, dreamers of the earth. Refresh your days not by changing your path, but by changing your sight. The miracle you seek is already here, waiting to be seen.