The graduation speaker at my brother’s college graduation at Ohio State University, gave a pandering and vacantly patriotic speech, while J.K. Rowling’s speech at Harvard, about failure and imagination was quite an inspiring read.
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. 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.