I have a proposal. My proposal is simple. My proposal is that you, dear reader, take 5 minutes, and you dream.

I want to you to dream about what kind of world/country/city/neighbourhood (place) you would love to live in, if anything was possible.

I want you to dream about how that place would effect everyone around you – the people in your life that really matter. Your friends. Your family. Your work colleagues. Even the person who moved out of the way to make sure you could get your bag through the crowd. The people who created those random acts of kindness that made your life that tiny bit more bearable.

Taking them all into consideration, I want you to really look into how that place would look like. How would things work? Who would run things? What sorts of things would be possible? How could people be happy? How could you be happy?

I want you to dream.

Because we’re told that when we get old, we have to stop believing in fairy tales. We’re told that things can’t be wonderful. We’re told we can’t. Over and over again, we’re told “no”.

So we’ve stopped dreaming. We’ve stopped hoping. We’ve stopped aspiring.

But, like fairy tales when we are children, these dreams are the things that keep us together. These hopes are the ones that build a better society. These aspirations allow us to make our dreams a reality.

And our dreams can come true. But we need to dream them first.

Because only then, only after the “idea” and the “hope” and the “aspiration” come back can we truly change things.

Until then, we are only fighting back. We are only stopping structures from being destroyed. We are only preventing things from getting worse.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of that. I want a better society, not for things to remain the same. I want hope, not fear.

And so, now that everything seems against us, is the time for building.