At my job, I am regularly asked to take a fish-poking stick out of the closet and prod rubber snappers out of a tube leading to an igloo. I use plexiglass cleaner to buff away fingerprints on the windows of a spaceship daily, and I use sanitary wipes to wash down Saturn and its rings. Sometimes I get a slice of pizza out of the deal.

I guess I should mention that I work at a children’s museum, and anyone who works around kids knows that you have to become pretty comfortable with things that do not make a lot of sense. In a child’s world, events do not need to have causal relations. The floor may look like some harmless tile to you, but it’s lava to the youngsters, and if you don’t hop over that spot it will engulf you in flames. That’s just the fact of the matter.

As we get older, we generally grow less patient with this sort of thing. We have less time to play games or concern ourselves with illogical interests. I think it’s a shame that we do that. I suppose it is necessary to our survival in the world to abide by its rules, at least most of the time, but our lives are much more interesting before we confine ourselves to things that make sense.

Modern art often frustrates people when images don’t necessarily tie in to real world order. We can find ourselves feeling irritated when a painting combines disparate pictures, especially when they don’t explicitly relate to a particular concept, emotion, or historical event. I’ve experienced this a few times myself, most recently when visiting the Mike Kelley exhibition at MoMA PS1 over winter break. Mike Kelley was a post-conceptual artist who worked in all conceivable media, from sculpture to photography, and touched upon a wide range of topics, from political activism to childhood innocence. There was no shortage of complex pieces, but I remember one especially well: a film, one of a series that seemed to me to have no continuity within it. It involved violent whipping and clowns and a golden man that could have represented the sun, God, or perhaps both.

I am probably not doing the piece any justice, and that is because I just did not get it. I watched the whole thing, all 12 minutes or so, hoping that it would come to some sort of resolution, and in the end, I felt more confused than before. I was sure there were metaphors involved, some allusions that flew over my head and landed gracefully on a more cultured observer’s, but I had missed all of them and it drove me nuts. I am no stranger to feeling disturbed when things don’t make sense to me.

I have not, however, looked the film up, despite having quite literally a world of information at my fingertips. The meaning might be out there, or it might not be, but I’m content now with what I took away from the experience. I’ve started to appreciate the fact that things don’t always click for one person the same way they will click for another, and there is something awesome about that.

When an artist creates a piece of artwork, it is similar, in a way, to a child making up a game from hir imagination: each is communicating hir own subconscious in a shared space, and the person on the receiving end will see it through a lens shaped through hir own experiences. You may not know the exact thought process behind a person’s creation, but it’s bound to remind you of something, and it’s bound to make you feel something. Sometimes that feeling is frustration. Sometimes that’s intended. One of the greatest aspects of ambiguity is that it requires us to project parts of ourselves into the experience, and in doing so, allows us to reevaluate them. When something makes an impression on you, even if it seems to make no sense, it can help to ask yourself why. It is a privilege to be able to set aside time to sort out your psyche. I suggest that we take advantage of it.

I recently started reading one of Kelly Link’s collections of short stories, “Magic for Beginners.” I knew going into it that it was a fantasy book, but I wasn’t prepared for the number of zombies, cat skins, parties, pajama pants, and tiny people packed into its 297 pages. The tales often begin with a fairly relatable story line, which makes it all the more startling when they diverge into a domain that defies all logic. I found it disconcerting at first. This did not keep me from returning to Link’s illusory world, in part simply because it provided a vacation from mine. After attempting to digest a sociological analysis of modern medical practices, Link’s stories allow my brain to stretch its limbs, and I’ve found that I often return to whatever needs doing with a refreshed perspective.

Nonsense in all its forms provides us with a break from the things we encounter every day. It fills our heads with images that wouldn’t otherwise be there; if nothing else, it keeps things interesting. When we are young, our minds are open and receptive to idea or image that comes our way, but as we grow older, we tend to take the world a lot more seriously. No matter your age, it’s important to play. It’s important to let your mind wander, and to embrace things you may have never encountered before. The ability of our brains to imagine is a pretty cool thing. We might as well use it.

Cummings is a member of the class of  2016.