Building the Infrastructure of Possibility

We need to deepen our storytelling of one specific kind of story, however – namely, the kind of story that can allow us to imagine a future replete with possibility.

Bringing about the world we want to live in, the world we want to leave to our children is, substantially, the work of the imagination, or what educational reformer John Dewey describes as ‘the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise’.18

Maybe it’s time to recognise that at the heart of our work is the need for those around us to be able to imagine a better world, to tell stories about it, to long for its realisation. If we can imagine it, desire it, dream about it, it is so much more likely that we will put our energy and determination into making it reality.

The world into which we are born was shaped by a capacity to generate the new through billions of years of evolution. Now, for us, a comparable capacity to imagine, together, is a vital aspect of what it means to be free and alive. Imagination liberates us from the illusion that the way the world is now is the only way it can be. In this sense, ima