When we are kids, even too young to talk, we begin to express ourselves with art. We draw. We color. We paint. We make crafts. We cut shapes. We make music with pans and sticks. We build with blocks and legos. We use anything at the disposal of our little hands to let the World (but mostly our parents) know what we are all about. Besides crying, it is our first form of communication. Not only does it help us communicate, we also use it to learn about what we don't understand. Expression in its most simple form. These are our Imaginations at work! And as kids, our Imaginations are humming.

Then we begin to grow up. We watch more TV/films/internet videos, play video games and we use our Imaginations less and less. The art continues through grade school, but when we get to junior high, it's an elective. By the time we get to high school, only about 35% of kids are taking any type of artistic class, which includes art, wood shop, playing an instrument, singing in the choir and writing for the school paper. After high school, it drops to less than 10%. Funding for these endeavors is always the first to go. Most don't give a shit that they're taking away one of our most important assets for communication.

Studies have shown that when Imagination and creativity is used often in schools and classrooms, everything gets better. Literally everything! Grades in all subjects. Test scores in all subjects. Attendance. Attention. Behavior. Everything! Art should be the last to go. It's salt! It makes everything better! You would never make food without salt. Everything has salt in it. Even the sweets.

Quitting Imaginative/creative/artistic endeavors is debilitating for everyone. It extends to everything beyond school, too. When we are artistic, everything in life gets better. It's exercising our Imaginations. It's the salt. The elixir for all that ails us, but we use it so infrequently. Most often, we let others entertain us with their Imaginations, which is important, too, but we'll never recognize the importance of it until we do it ourselves. We're losing one of the most important aspects of communication, a highway into the individual Imagination, the greatest destination one can visit.

You wouldn't sew your mouth shut or paint your eyeballs black or stuff your ears with cotton, but that's what we're doing when we don't do anything artistic. We're ignoring one of our senses. The salt! The most sophisticated and complex of all the senses. Where all the other senses come to be made sense of.

Use your Imagination! Write! Draw! Paint! Play music! Write music! Make films! Sculpt! Cook!(with salt). One of our first and most important forms of communication is being forgotten. Go back down the road to where you through it out, dust it off and make it new again. We're all artists. We just have to do art. It will make everything better!