Dreaming Utopia

I was sitting by a cafe window on a cold winter day across from one of my dearest friends when one of us (I can no longer remember who) confessed a long-time daydream:

When we walk around Porto and see For Sale banners hanging on building balconies, we dream about buying them, fixing them up, and housing people for free.

The reason I can’t remember whose daydream confession happened in that cozy cafe next to the radical bookstore, where we (who had met through activism in the city) met to catch up and dream up the world we wanted to live in is because the very next second, the other person’s heart leapt with joy as they confessed as well:

Me too.

For my friend, the dream was “what if I won the lottery?” and for me it was (primarily because I have never played said lottery) “what would I do if I were Colleen Hoover or J.K. Rowling rich?”

Neither outcome likely, but I imagine most people have asked themselves that question from time to time.

Certainly part of both our answers were about our comfort and the comfort of those around us. “I’d live basically the same life,” she said. “Just not worrying about money.” I felt the same, though I’d also go to the hairdresser every week and hire someone to make my administrative phone calls because I hate phone calls with my whole soul. Both of us had people specifically in mind whose lives we’d change. And both of us also had communities of people we’d never met whose lives we could imagine changing.

The conversation shifted the course of our coffee date as we let more and more of our secret dreams out of our hearts and into the open.

She wanted to open a cafe and hire people who needed the contract to maintain their visas. I saw her vision and raised her mine: a free cafe where the community could host activist meetings, open mic nights, discussion groups, and everything would be donation only or pay-what-you-can, with any funds beyond the food, drinks, and wages of the baristas going back into the little Utopian ecosystem to fund its other community good projects.

The dreams kept pouring out of us. A free library with books in multiple languages. A tool library where community members could come borrow hammers and screwdrivers when they needed them. Apartments offered for free to artists and activists, decorated and furnished collectively through donations of time, furnishings, or cash. Free studio space. Communal gardens. A free on-staff therapist who chose their own hours. Takeaway sandwiches for anyone hungry. Every worker with limited working hours, space for their own creative projects, and unlimited vacation time. A bulletin board where people could offer skill or object swaps or simply pay it forward, helping others move furniture, bake a pie, apply for a grant, tune a piano, learn to surf.

“With Euromillions money, you could buy more than one building.”

“You could a buy whole blocks.”

We daydreamed together for hours, until I had to call it quits and get back to researching my current work in progress. But the daydreams have been with both of us for a long time, and they certainly still are.

Now, when we’re together, they bubble up again.

She says, “With the current lottery totals, I could buy 400 apartments. That’s 400 families’ lives changed.”

I think, I’d hire videographers and do an online vlog about building Utopia. Because there has to be a ripple effect of inspiration, of seeing people do the things you want for your community. I think about all the things I’ve learned from YouTube videos and TikTok shorts and podcasts and how we can pay it forward in that way too.

A week or two later, we pass a woman on the street struggling with two heavy bags of groceries on her crutches. I stop and ask if she’d like help. She says yes and we walk with her just half a block more and take the bags to the elevator for her. She says she doesn’t need it, but I give her my phone number and tell her to text if she wants help. We’re neighbors. I live just two minutes away.

She cries and tells us a little about her surgery and how her husband/partner works long hours, so she needed to do the grocery run on her own.

I think about how the systems that exist now are failing us all. Her because she was in pain and needed help. Me because I want the joy of helping. Not because I’m some kind of angel but because that’s the world I want to live in. Because I am her and she is me. Because I have my own history of chronic illness and not being able to carry something up the stairs. I have my own history of weeping because it was so painful to take the dog out to pee.

My friend says, “this wouldn’t happen in our Utopia.”

Indeed, I hope it wouldn’t.

Somewhere in there, my friend said our conversation inspired her to think about what she could do without the Euromillions. Because some of these things are within reach. Helping my neighbor with her bags. Starting a little free library. Feeding people.

We both have our activism. We both have our personal projects. We both have our art.

And we both will still keep dreaming of Utopia. Building it in our heads and finding comfort in it. Being prepared on the very slight chance that one day one or both of us could make some part of it happen.

Today, I’m sharing it with you because maybe there’s some small part of our Utopia that you can make happen in your community.

Maybe free sandwiches for hungry people. Maybe a tool library (something high up on my own “you can do this now” list). Maybe a little free library. Maybe snacks for the neighborhood kids. Or perhaps you have done well for yourself and are thinking about a bigger financial way to give back to the community and the idea of a free cafe or an artist residency or paying for people’s therapy or hiring someone who needs the contract for their visa resonates with you.

This is, I suppose, your invitation to join us in dreaming of and perhaps even making little Utopias.