I have a couple of children, and one of the things I’m distracted by from time to time is a nagging worry about what sort of world they are growing up in; a world of superficiality (Kardashians, “Big Brother”, pop music) and where a large percentage of people didn’t buy or read a book in the last year (some often quoted stats in the interweb suggest up to 80% of US families).

Just consider for a moment some of the stupid/scary/evil/comic people who actually run our little planet – Kim Jong-un ( North Korea); Bashar al-Assad (Syria); Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe); not to mention the likes of Islamic State.  It drives me nuts that they are so driven by myopic ideology that they fail to comprehend something Henry Ford eloquently said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”  It’s ground hog day; it’s like watching a car accident in slow motion. The comic caricatures of these people are sometimes so accurate it makes you cringe – if you haven’t seen Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police, then you must if only for the depiction of Kim Jong-il.

In Western democracies governments are often hamstrung by self interest and ideological point scoring.  Whatever your political affiliations, what most people I talk to just want is a government that is allowed to get on with delivering for the benefit of the community … if they do a bad job, we’ll let them know at the next election.

We are a world of bad news and pessimism where only disasters (natural and man-made) and mistakes of policy makers are news; if you can find news that isn’t about celebrities’ dating or dieting habits.  Are we really a world on the brink of climate destruction, economic malaise, Ebola, war, a widening gap between rich and poor? Perhaps, but we do seem to be a world of leaders totally incapable of visioning or communicating a future of hope and optimism and thus paralysed from acting gently and with grace.

Arrghh!

But there are moments of stillness when these thoughts are swept away. For example, when my children were young, each evening pessimism was swept away when I sat down with them and read a bed-time story – sometimes chosen by my son, sometimes by my daughter and sometimes by me.   The choice of book was not as important as the ritual itself.  The ritual of getting ready for bed, gathering the family around, staring at the bookshelf, choosing a book – sometimes at random, sometimes with much forethought – sitting on the floor or the bed and then enjoying the story – the flow, the illustrations, the humour, the moral and the pantomime of reading it out loud playing the various characters.

The ritual had a restorative effect.

It provided me the opportunity to bond with my kids, which was so valuable given I work full time and don’t get the chance to spend a lot of time with them during the week.  It gave me insight in to their developing personalities and gave the kids an appreciation for my sense of humour and that adults are allowed, and in my world, encouraged, to be silly.  Aside from this there is so much evidence that reading to children is amongst the single most important things you can do to improve your kids chances for success in school.

Imagine what we could achieve if we could replicate this ritual with our political leaders; if we could read a bed-time story to the presidents, prime ministers, sultans, premiers, chancellors, Taoiseachs, kings, queens and princes of this world.

All this got me thinking one day years ago, and an image popped into my mind; there I was sitting on my daughter’s bed with Vladimir Putin propped up on one of my knees and Barak Obama on the other (an impossibly comic image).   In my mind both men were listening in rapture as I read Hunwick’s Egg by Mem Fox (possibly the greatest illustrated children’s book author of all time).

I have often fantasised about the power of this simple act over the years.  The power to fundamentally sweep away ideology and dogma, if only for a few minutes, so they can share and contemplate a story with a simple universal moral – the power the imagination has to change the way we see the world – in just the same way the ritual of reading a book with my kids restored my faith in an optimistic future.

My kids are independent readers now; which means I’m just one step closer to that redundancy all parents inevitably face.  They no longer need me to read with them.  But I still find that stillness when I pick up a great book at night … sometimes annoyingly sharing passages with my patient wife that have particularly inspired me with their poetic beauty or astonishingly ambitious syntax and sometimes as I quietly absorb a simple, clever story.