Next stop Museum!

Are you a frequent museum visitor? What do you enjoy the most in museums? What is the trigger for your museum visit? Well, in this post I’ll try to answer these questions and through my personal experiences I am going to describe to you why spending our free time in museums is beneficial. Plus, I hope to help you discover more reasons to visit museums in the future.

While I was trying to identify all the reasons why I visit museums, in order to write this post, I realized that it was only one. It was the same since I was a child and maybe it transformed and became more complex throughout the years, but it was the main factor that drove me every time. This factor is the imagination that I feel when I am in a museum. Based on that I am able to create, learn, feel and understand more.

Most of my visits as a child were with school. It wasn’t a common thing for me to spend my free time with my family in museums. However, I was always fascinated by them. Although the other students prefered theatres and fun activities, I loved to visit museums and hear about all the stories, see all the different objects and create in my mind my own tales because that was fun for me. Sometimes, I was in these stories, wearing the beautiful dresses and jewellery, wandering around the streets of ancient Athens or living in the Byzantine era as a princess. You can say that I had quite an imagination.

As an adult, museums are still a fun activity for me. But now I have the control, it is my choice where I want to go and which artifacts I prefer to see and spend my time with. Now I am not creating stories like before, but I try to identify the stories behind the objects. Now I am not the princess or the ancient Athenian but I take the investigator’s role. I attempt to reveal where the objects came from, how they were used and the material they were made from. Of course, I don’t know all the answers, but through that game I trigger my curiosity. I try to find answers, I expand my knowledge and understanding and I believe that museums fulfil their cause for me.

Museums always, even when they weren’t called museums, but cabinets of curiosity, had as a cause to make people feel inspired. Inspired and curious to understand the world, learn more about life, other people and themselves. That’s what museums do, they set the questions and then people have to find the answers. But these questions sometimes don’t have just one answer, and maybe that answer isn’t objectively accepted. How can we give answers to unsolved mysteries and problems? For example, how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, what was the Antikythera mechanism for? We don’t know, we are not scientists but we can think, we can get inspired by these questions and try to understand, learn and then form our own opinions.

Thus, although the first stop of my trip is imagination, it continues alongside with creativity, inspiration,learning and curiosity. Because all of them are connected somehow and the one drives you to the others. Museums make me feel happy and creative because in them I play, I create my own meanings and experiences and I transform myself. I see all these beautiful and unique objects and I connect them with my identity, with my personal stories and experiences. Moreover, I feel inspired and complete after every visit. All that learning helps me produce new ideas and explore even more my interests and horizons.

Maybe imagination is not the main trigger for you but I am sure that you’ll have others like, learning or creativity. All that remains, is to plan your own visit and explore yourself and museums. Find out what you enjoy the most and become a frequent museum visitor. And if you already know, don't hesitate to write back to me about your stories in museums.