The Walk - Imagination Is Not Escapism

Some weeks feel like spring sunlight breaking through the trees. Other weeks feel like standing in the hail with your hands in your pockets, wondering why everything suddenly turned cold again.

This past week felt like both at the same time.

After returning from the Camino, I found myself immediately pulled back into a whirlwind of obligations: parish life, fantasy festivals, interviews, talks, trains that weren’t running, late nights, and a stubborn cold that refused to leave. Somewhere between coughing fits, crowded convention halls and endless cups of tea, I also had to write something that unexpectedly terrified me: a sermon about fantasy.

Not a church sermon, at least not really. This was for a fantasy festival held inside a former church in Nijmegen. The organizers had invited me, partly as a priest and partly because I’ve somehow become known in Dutch fantasy circles as “that priest who likes fantasy stories.” And despite years of public speaking, despite television work and podcasts and interviews, I suddenly felt like an impostor. Like I didn’t belong there. Not enough of a writer. Not enough of a fantasy expert. Too religious for one world, too geeky for the other.

So naturally, I procrastinated completely.

What finally unlocked the entire talk was an unexpected memory of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As a child, that factory looked more like heaven to me than clouds and golden harps ever did. And from there the entire theme suddenly became clear: imagination matters because every meaningful future first exists as a story we dare to tell ourselves.

That is why fantasy matters.

Not because it helps us escape reality, but because it reminds us that reality is not finished yet. Every creative act begins with imagination. Every hopeful future starts with someone envisioning something better than what currently exists. Children understand this instinctively. Adults often lose it under layers of exhaustion, cynicism and endless bad news.

Maybe that is why stories still matter so much to me. Whether it’s Tolkien, Studio Ghibli, the Camino, saints, or the fantasy novels I’m slowly trying to finish. Stories keep alive the part of us that still believes transformation is possible.

And maybe that’s also why I needed a few days of rest, video games and long walks in the rain.

Not every pause is failure.

Sometimes recovery is part of the creative process too.

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