Rainbow Again.

What children's letters to the future can teach us about dreaming without apology

A few of the essays from an essay writing competition I judged.

Recently I was asked to judge an essay competition for grade school students at a local school, grades 2 - 5. The premise of the competition was for the young students to answer one important question: What do you hope for your future self or the future world?

I found myself becoming so emotional as I read through their work—their insightfulness, so untarnished by the bullshit of adulthood. Their ideas made me laugh, surprised me, and on more than one occasion, made me cry. Some wrote about new kinds of armies, the kinds that will dutifully take care of plants and forests instead of killing one another. Many of them wrote about AI, with one young third grader writing: “I predict we will have more AI creations than real ones and that it will be harder for people to make a living.” Another young student wrote, “Dear Future Self, I think that there will be more AI and less trees.”

What strikes me most is that these children are not writing fantasy, they are writing prophecy—or at the very least, a kind of emotional truth that adults have long since learned to suppress. We spend so much of our grown lives managing expectations, hedging our bets, softening our fears with cynicism and our dreams with practicality, that we forget what it looks like to see the world clearly. Children have not yet been handed that particular coping mechanism. And when they dream, they dream without apology. They dream with incorruptible vision. If we are willing to listen, really listen, children don't just remind us what's worth saving. They remind us that saving it is still possible. (See the books of Ayana Elizabeth Johnson , “All We Can Save” and “What if We Get it Right?”)

Just me, sobbing over here.

Some of the letters were filled with such prescient hope, imagining whole worlds for themselves where adults “stop fighting and start loving” or where “money will no longer be as important as good friendship.” There were desires to become the first scientist to find a total cure for cancer or to become the first marine biologist to heal the coral reefs so that they become “rainbow again.” Each new essay overwhelmed me with emotion for these young children and the futures they could see so clearly. In the words of Pete Townsend, the kids are alright.

Your Creative Call to Action this week: Inspired by these students, write a letter to your future self or to the future world.

Not a to-do list. Not a vision board. A letter—the kind a child would write, before they learned to be embarrassed by wanting things too much.

Write about what you hope for. What you fear. What you’d fix if someone handed you the world and said, go ahead, it’s yours. Let yourself be prescient, foolish, heartbroken, and wildly optimistic all in the same paragraph. The kids didn’t hedge. Neither should you.

And if you catch yourself writing “that will never happen”—good. Write it anyway. Say it anyway. Dream it anyway. That resistance is exactly where the letter needs to go.

Share yours in the comments, post it online, and as always, tag me.

Substack Lives this summer:

• The world of publishing with author and publisher of Wave Books, Matthew Zapruder

• A conversation with tech-founder and former META consultant Jesse Nolan on how to fix the left’s branding woes

• What we can (and should) learn from the sex lives of animals with the great granddaughter of Eleanor Roosevelt herself, Perrin Roosevelt Ireland

• How to wield artistry in a weaponized world with multi-hyphenate and award-winning poet, Mahogany Browne.

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