Angus Hervey

And the truth is that it has always been this way.

Even as we rebuilt from the ashes of the Second World War, the shadow of nuclear annihilation loomed.

The pandemic devastated our communities, yet our scientific response was revolutionary.

Climate change threatens our future, yet its solution, clean energy, offers us a fairer, better world.

This is not an easy paradox to hold in your head or in your heart.

The understanding that in the same moment innocent people are being snatched off the streets and children are dying in airstrikes, the malaria wards are emptying across an entire continent, and in a faraway village under a thousand stars, a young girl who had once been forced into marriage is studying equations under an electric light that wasn't there a year ago.

Real life isn't a story.

History doesn't have a moral arc.

Progress isn't a rule.

It is contested terrain, fought for daily by millions of people who refuse to give in to despair.

Ultimately, none of us know whether we're living in the downswing or the upswing of history.

But I do know that we all get a choice.

We, all of us, get to decide which one of these stories we are a part of.

We add to their grand weave in the work that we do, in the daily decisions we make about where to put our money, where to put our energy and our time, in the stories we tell each other and in the words that come out of our mouths.

It is not enough to believe in something anymore.

It is time to do something.

Ask yourself,

If our worst fears come to pass and the monsters breach the walls, who do you want to be standing next to?

The prophets of doom or the cynics who said, we told you so?

Or the people who, with their eyes wide open, dug the trenches and fetched water?