The other day I was at the swimming pool, and I overheard this little girl talking to her mum about the concept of paying for food. I couldn’t hear exactly what she was asking, but it seemed to be something along the lines of why it should be that only people who had the money to pay for food should get it, and what people were supposed to do if they didn’t?

I heard the mum telling the child that the government did help people who couldn’t afford to pay for food – “a bit”. But the little girl persisted. She started imagining a place like a food shop where one could go to get food, but without having to pay any money. The mum seemed to be struggling to wrap her mind around this concept.

And I suddenly remembered a very similar conversation that a friend recounted to me when we were in secondary school. She said that when she was little, she’d started asking very similar questions. She’d asked her parents why we couldn’t have a system where you just got what you needed without having to pay for it, and her parents similarly struggled to understand. They said, “What, you mean barter?”, and – after having the concept of barter explained to her – she’d said no. That you’d just be able to go into the food shop and take what you needed, without having to give anything directly in exchange.

The way she told the story, her parents were alarmed by the fact that their small child was expressing sentiments that they perceived to be communist. This was not long after the end of the Cold War – that was the era that we grew up in. For the average sensible middle class parent, a communist was almost the worst and most misguided thing that you could be.

But that story stuck with me, and listening to that small child asking very sensible questions about why we should be denied access to the basic necessities of life just because we can’t afford to pay for them – it got me thinking about that again. I suspect that many, if not most, children go through a phase of asking those kinds of questions.

Because kids are amazing. Kids are wise. Kids haven’t yet assimilated all of the bullshit that structures our understanding of the world. They don’t have the same assumptions about what can and can’t be, what is and isn’t possible, what does and doesn’t make sense – concepts that we’ve had to assimilate just to survive.

And so I think we should all listen to the questions that children ask, because they tend to be very good ones. They tend to be the questions that we can’t see any more, because we’re too blinkered.

All this reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend recently about William Morris’s News from Nowhere (which I must admit I’ve still yet to read), which imagines a utopian future in which nobody has to pay money for bread. My friend said that she’d read this and hadn’t really got on with it at the time, that she’d found it somehow childish or naive – that her grown-up analytical brain was capable of coming up with so many problems and reasons why the system that was being portrayed couldn’t possibly work. But nonetheless it stuck with her, just like that conversation that my friend recounted stuck with me.

She said it kept coming into her mind, that she kept coming back to it somehow. And I think it’s that imaginative space that so many of us are denied in our lives, that we are so desperately yearning for. That space that children show us how to open up for ourselves – because it’s always there waiting to be accessed, and children have such ready access to it. A space where we begin to see possibilities rather than only problems.

Because God knows my grown-up analytical brain is capable of coming up with at least half a dozen reasons why modern financialised capitalism cannot possibly work – and yet it does. I mean, it doesn’t work well. It doesn’t work well for people or for the planet. It’s destroying our health. It’s destroying our only planetary home. It’s creating massive inequality and injustice. It’s unstable. It’s inefficient. But it functions – for a given value of functioning. It exists, despite all of that.

And so the fact that we can come up with a thousand problems and reasons why something couldn’t possibly work isn’t a reason why it couldn’t exist. It isn’t a reason why those problems couldn’t be surmounted, given the ingenuity that our very grown-up analytical brains are capable of bringing to them – if we can just allow ourselves to access that beautiful imaginative openness that our children already have.