A million Dreams
Have you ever seen kids playing? They pretend to be great World Cup footballers, princesses, horseback riders, unicorns, fairies, teachers or doctors. They pretend to be what they dream of and what they wish to become. When do they stop playing? When do they stop dreaming?
With every year, every month, and every day, kids have to face more and more of “real life” and less and less of their dream world. Kids become young adults and have to face the challenges that come with going to school and working towards a future in which they can earn a living for themselves and their families. Soon, this seems to be all that matters, and there’s no space for dreaming.
One day the little boy puts his football in a corner of his room and never takes it out to play again. One day the little girl closes her doctor’s bag and never thinks of it again. And one day the two friends build their last sandcastle and never go to the playground again. They dreamed of becoming footballers, doctors and architects. But they didn’t. Instead they became mechatronic engineers, nurses and construction workers. They were busy being part of a system they would have never have dreamed of.
We talk a lot about what kind of people should have more or less power in our world. There are girls saying they should finally get more power than boys, there are men who say that they should remain the most powerful people, there are adults saying they deserve more power than the younger generation and there are young people saying that they are the future and deserve power too. All of these discussions are useless. Real power doesn’t belong to any special kind of people. Real power belongs to dreams. The great leaders of our world, the people we look up to, the ones who created changes in our world, all of them had dreams.
If power belongs to those who have dreams, then a great amount of power belongs to kids and young adults. A child learns about the world by seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling and smelling it. As a child we see things we like and things we don’t like. And we start dreaming of changes until we’re taught that how things are today is the right way. Which isn’t true. It’s just more comfortable to keep going than to change. But there are young people who kept dreaming and reached their goals — or at least they’re being heard today. There is Greta Thunberg, who keeps fighting to raise awareness of and inspire action against climate change. She started by going on a school strike on her own, and today millions of students are following her example while she is talking to world leaders. There is Malala Yousafzai, who believed so deeply in her dream of a great education that she accepted the danger of being attacked by terrorists at the age of only 15, and even after being shot and severely injured, has never stopped her fight. And those are just two examples.
Take a minute to think back to all the dreams you had as a child. Pick one of them and imagine what would have happened if you had never let it go and were living it today. Now imagine what a world would look like where every child lived out at least one of his or her dreams. In a world where schools and communities don’t strive to make kids fit perfectly into a system they don’t want to fit into, but work together to support their dreams, the power of youth could turn the whole world upside down. And in that world, the power wouldn’t belong to girls or boys, youth or adults. The power would belong to everyone who had a dream of making the world a better place, and worked to turn their dreams into reality. And in the end there would be a million dreams changing our world to the best place possible.
