She wants to grow up to be a fairy, so I’m helping her invent the wings.

…A better post will come later, but there’s something I needed to type, and as I guess it shouldn’t scar anybody too badly, I thought I’d put it here and take advantage of the Power of the Audience to help me remember:

It’s worth it. 

Happiness is a real thing.  Success is possible, and your dreams are not stupid.  You don’t need to file the edges off of them so that they fit the reality you think you know — Stick with "I want to grow up to be a fairy", and you’ll do great things.

It’s worth the effort to believe.

–in all the good stuff.  It is an effort, as you get older; believing means elbowing yourself a LOT of room in the Accepted Logic, means being willing to be looked at as batshit sometimes, dismissed, doubted, sometimes exiled.  But it’s worth it, because:

The best things are possible.

It’s easier to simply say "anything is possible" but this is not about that.  This is about the fact that the BEST THINGS are possible, all the best things you imagine, and therefore it’s worth it to suffer the adult indignities of imagining them, of keeping those wishes and dreams alive.  As adults, we get too mired in "but how?", because suddenly it’s our job to make things happen in this world, and when you’re a kid you always figure that there’s somebody out there somewhere who’s bigger and smarter than you and can do it (frequently, you’re thinking of some version of royalty, a group or race that "handles things"), and then when you grow up you realize that Congratulations, The World Leaders Are Your Peers, and they’re perfectly human and totally flawed and sometimes worse than anybody you’ve ever known.  So then you think of your magical, wonderful, amazing dreams and you think, "Great, who the hell is going to pull that off?  In this world?" …and then it becomes too painful to keep looking at it, the Dream that will Never Be, and you look away. 

But it IS possible.  It is ALL possible.  This is logically necessary, or at least one hell of a defensible and justified inductive inference that science and probability would totally stand behind, since it’d be hard to argue that the human species hasn’t pulled off something impossible at least once a generation. And things are speeding up, for certain.  Really, it’s a great time to be a dreamer.

I know, I know, the first thought that’s sitting there when you look is, "Okay, yeah…but how?"  And the answer to that is as infinite as the Best Things people might imagine, but we can say that it all starts with the imagining itself, so that indeed, failure of that particular faith is a self-fulfilling action. 

Once you imagine, as fearlessly and clearly as you can, then the next step is to bring your mental creations forward into the real world — a task that thankfully, you have the precisely right flux-capacitor to pull off, a quantumly-fused mind-body reality interface right there inside you, powering you like Iron Man’s Chest Thingy. 

Your dreams have to manifest in your thoughts first, the vividness and clarity of which you’ve been working on since you were a kid (you’ll be rusty if you’ve stopped, but it’ll come back), and then they can manifest in your actions, great and subtle, and your actions will affect others, changing the behavior and thoughts of those who can share your dream, and POOF!  Worldwide conquest.

Who cares if it sounds stupid?  It’s been done by everyone from Gandhi to the inventors of the cell phone. 

Humans are creators.  

What do you think "made in the image of the Creator" means? 

Why would you have all these vivid, beautiful ideas, if not because you ought to have faith in them, even if faith is a lot harder than anybody ever told you when you were sitting in church as a kid?  In fact, looking back on Jesus’ story as an adult, it’s pretty easy to see how even though it was presented to you as generally pretty nice, in reality it’s a LOTR tale, a tale of a difficult fucking life that ended in a long torturous death, but, by virtue of faith, changed the world. 

SURE IT’S A METAPHOR, but it’s a damn good one, so what’s to doubt?  Stories are more trustworthy than people anyway.  "Trust in Jesus:  Metaphors are Very Reliable", heh.

All that said.  The important thing is,

Faith is not wrong.  Belief in magic is not a pointless luxury. 

Your belief, your conviction, your hope for a best possible future is a key ingredient in that, or any other success you may achieve or inspire. 

Don’t buy the line that you’re not a big enough entity to create:  You’ve created plenty already.  You create all the time, even when you don’t mean to.  Thus the most responsible thing you can do IS to hope, to believe, to have faith. 

Maybe your dream is to write something, make something, say something, do something, or change something you hate about the way other people have built this world. 

Maybe it’s all of those things.  Either way, no matter what, no matter how late in the game it feels, don’t forget it, and don’t lose faith in it.

Thank you.