Today is Zukunftstag in Switzerland, the Future Day. A day where kids are sent out to peek into the machinery of adult life. Supposedly to inspire them, but really, it is to start shaping them into something manageable.
The idea is polite, the execution sterile. They call it opportunity, but it is more like orientation toward the narrow lanes society still calls the future.
They dress it up with moral slogans: girls should try male jobs, boys should try female ones. It sounds progressive, but the message underneath is the same. Be what we tell you to be, just under a different banner.
As a social worker, I have taken her everywhere. Welfare offices, homeless shelters, the schools I worked for. She has met my colleagues and my clients. She has sat beside me while I listened to stories that would make most adults pause. She has seen how society works, and more often how it does not.
What they are trying to achieve with Zukunftstag (Future Day), she has already lived. Not as a simulation, but as a childhood. When I studied Philosophy in my later forties, I made her the topic of my master thesis. I called it Simple Questions, Big Ideas. It explored what a child's questions can teach us about life. Her curiosity opened doors into dreams, identity, money, and meaning. She reminded me that the deepest truths rarely come from certainty. They come from wonder.
So when my daughter said she wants to be an artist, I tried the conventional route anyway. I called a few artists, but nobody picked up. In hindsight, perfect. Real artists do not schedule creativity. They do not wait for the system to fit them in.
That is when it hit me. You do not apply to be an artist. You declare it.
Joseph Beuys once said, everyone is an artist. It was not a slogan. It was a revolt, a reminder that art begins when you stop waiting for permission.
So today, while the other kids are shadowing bankers or engineers, my daughter will be doing something braver. She will simply begin. Draw, write, build, dream, whatever form it takes.
I already have something in mind. I will tell her to walk through the house and pick an object. Draw it three times.
First, draw what you see. Perception. Seeing the thing as it is.
Second, draw how it feels. Interpretation. Letting the inner sense reshape it.
Third, draw it as if it came from a dream. Invention. Letting imagination transform it.
If she understands this, she will understand something important. Art, as well as life, is not only about talent. It is about perspective. You do not copy the world. You bring a new one into existence, one that would not exist without you.
Every blank page is a referendum on reality. Each act of creation is a quiet rebellion, a way of saying that you can become more than what others tell you to be.
