In Defense Of Hope
“a love / to which there is no reply”; or, happy new year
I’ve been trying to figure out for ages how to open this essay because what I actually want to say about 2018 — and, more importantly, 2019 — does not feel like new or exciting ground: “the world is a hopeful place and there is hope left in me”. I’ve written most of the rest of it over the course of December without ever really knowing where to begin. Fast forward to now: it’s late at night on the Saturday before Christmas and as Bing Crosby murmurs the weary world rejoices at the edge of the room I’m realizing that perhaps it is okay, just this once, to set aside the idea of new ground and instead to focus on where my heart wants to be: the world is a hopeful place and there is hope left in me.
The weary world rejoices.
Medium does a lovely essay compilation called Words That Matter wherein writers are invited to select a word that best encapsulates the previous year, and then write an essay defending that choice. Having already given myself the permission to tread well-worn ground, I will shamelessly admit that my word of the year is hope. And let me draw for you an image, too, of what I look like as I write this paragraph: 2018 was the hardest year of my life (citation needed, though, as always, this is about much more and much less than grief while simultaneously being precisely and exactly about grief), and it is so easy to be afraid of 2019; I am declaring my word of the year as hope, and my head is high and I am defiant and I am looking to the future and I am demanding everything. The weary world rejoices. It is a hopeful place. There is hope left in me.
Mary Oliver — a great luminary when it comes to the map of my life — wrote a poem called Heavy that almost makes me think that I should quit trying to sum up my year when she’s already done it so beautifully. In the great vain tradition of people predisposed to write about their life, I am going to do so anyway — but I will make the concession that the best place to start is probably with the entirety of the poem.
Mary Oliver | Heavy
That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,
as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it –
books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?
How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe
also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?
The crux of this essay lies at this idea of carrying heartache around while practicing admiring the things of this world: a love to which there is no reply. I think — between that and the whole thing about the weary world rejoicing — that gets most of the important stuff out of the way, as context for my defense of hope.
It is, after all, a tenuous concept. I understand that. I understand that hope is easy to cultivate and hard to sustain. I said above: in 2019, I am demanding everything. And yet — I also understand that, if I am to have anything, I am going to have to make a grab for it. 2018 has been the year of understanding that the taking any of the things I want begins with caring for my own self — through richer and poorer, better and worse, sickness and health, until death do us part. As I look forward to 2019, I’m thinking about what it means to care for yourself in a world that, very often, will not reply to the love you put into it.
Last month I was talking with a group of friends and I confessed that years ago I hit a squirrel with my car, a few weeks after I moved into the house I live in now, and I still occasionally think about it and cry. “How on earth do you live in the world?” demanded a new friend, half-joking, and a much older friend locked eyes with me and I knew from her frown that she was thinking the same thing that I was: well, with quite a lot of difficulty, to be quite goddamn frank.
There are many words for this trait. A kind term is “sensitive”. My mother’s term is “tender-hearted” (more on that in a moment). I’m sure there are other, less-kind terms in the world. Whatever we call it, it has often made hope feel challenging for me.
Over the summer I confessed to my mother that the thought of trying to have a baby again is terrifying to me because even though the first loss felt like a lightning strike for how out-of-the-blue it was, many women lose babies as a matter of course. I do not think, I tried to explain, I could endure another loss and try even again. My next loss will be my last. And loss is so common, with no possible inoculation. Do you understand?
You have always been tender-hearted, my mom said, with a thoughtfulness that belied the speed with which she answered, and I thought about how little patience the world carries for tenderness.
How on earth am I supposed to live in the world?
Mary Oliver, as usual, wrote the answer first. The answer is wrapped up in “that time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying — and I went closer, and did not die”.
I have, like all of you, not-died many times, now. Two of the most significant:
In 2014 I thought I would die. My best friend died that summer, and I had staked no small degree of certainty on our lives being wrapped up in each other into the very uppermost branches of old age. And yet — he died, and I lived, and I have done enough emotional heavy lifting over the years (a journey we started together) to understand and articulate that without him, I have lived into a very lovely life anyway. Strange, and sad, and true. A little bit beautiful.
In 2018 I almost died, though it did not occur to me until later that I might have. My baby did, and in the emergency room in the middle of the night someone cut out the right half of my reproductive system and flushed out the liters of blood I’d dumped into my own abdomen. In the morning a doctor told me that if I’d waited any longer to come in, I would have been waiting to die. And yet — I did not. As I have gotten farther away from that weekend, I have understood more and more how, for however much I thought about death in 2014, I had never been close to my own before (or since).
Most importantly, in 2014 and 2018, and every year I have lived since 1989, the grief did not kill me; I did not die. This year I went closer than I thought I could stand. I would never have chosen it, but then, the universe doesn’t seem to care very much what we would or would not choose. The existentialists would tell you that the meaning we can create in this life bubbles up from the choices we make in response to the things we would never have asked for. This seems about right to me — or, at least, it seems as good a tree as any other to huddle underneath to dry off and get warm.
I have known for some time on some level that the critical work of the world is to understand the extent to which the world will never love you back and then to love it anyway. I am beginning to realize that another piece of critical work lies in realizing that what is in front of me — even if it is the very closest I’ve ever stood to grief — is unlikely to kill me. Another sadder way to say this is that there will be many worsts, but only one last; no matter how painful a truth is, the balance of probability is that I will (have to/get to) carry it tomorrow, too. It’s hard. As I’ve gotten older it has only gotten harder. But then, I’ve only gotten better.
So we come back to this, always: how on earth am I supposed to live in the world? There are a million answers; some rooted in my own experience, some borne of literature, still others wrapped up in aspiration. All, in varying degrees, correct. Some answers that I feel quite confident about, annotated for clarity:
1. One day at a time
— Obviously. And yet.
2. Kindly, with consideration to others
— This one feels natural at its skin and challenging at its bones.
3. Kindly, with consideration to myself
— This one feels challenging at its skin and natural at its bones.
4. “Admiring, admiring, admiring, the things that are kind, and maybe also troubled”
— When I think about admiring troubled things, it makes me wonder whether it is possible to admire something without loving it; the love comes naturally but the admiration does not. I am still learning.
5. Bravely
— This feels like new-years-resolution territory and frankly a bit tough to get my head around; perhaps I will spend some time with it in 2019.
6. In such a way that leaves it better than I found it
— This one feels sometimes impossible. It feels bigger than me. It also usually feels like the most important one on the list and has threaded its way through most of my life. My favorite book as a kid was Miss Rumphius, a book about a woman who decides, after a long childhood spent grappling with how to change the world, that she will plant flowers in an effort to make the world more beautiful. At the book’s conclusion, her efforts endure: her lupines grow along the coast for generations, and the world, long after she leaves it, is more beautiful. I dressed as her for Halloween one year. My grandma made my cape, because Miss Rumphius wears one in the book.
— I have always been quite concerned with the idea of using myself to make the world more beautiful.
7. With care, at all times and in all places, for my own self
— For whatever it’s worth, Miss Rumphius shared the National Book Award for Children’s Books with Doctor De Soto, a story of a mouse dentist who helps a fox with a toothache, having deciding that treating an animal in pain is worth the risk of being eaten. Doctor De Soto does glue the fox’s mouth temporarily shut after fixing him up, which seems a little shitty at first glance… except that it turns out the fox did in fact plan to eat him. It sounds a little heavy for a children’s book but the message holds up: be kind to others, and fix what you can, and also it is always wise to protect yourself. I never tried to be Doctor De Soto. Perhaps I should have.
— There is always time to become something new.
Here is an important part of the Doctor De Soto story: the fox’s toothache is severe enough that he has to come in twice. The first appointment is an extraction and Doctor De Soto wants to quit after the fox mumbles in his sleep how much he loves to eat mice. His wife reminds him that their job is to help. So, in spite of the fear, Doctor De Soto arranges for the fox to come back after the extraction to a second appointment, where he will install a new tooth. This tiny mouse puts this fox under for a second time after he has literally said out loud that he would eat him and he puts a new tooth in so that the fox’s pain will go away, and then, right after, he glues that motherfucker’s jaw shut because who knows what in this world will try to kill you.
Doctor De Soto, Miss Rumphius, and Mary Oliver are all saying the same thing: put goodness into the world because it’s the right thing to do, not because of a promise of ever seeing a reward for it — even as base a reward as “not being actively endangered”. Do the right, kind, honest thing. Fix the tooth. Plant the lupines. Admire the things of this world. Grieve what is lost, and practice, throughout, laughter that at first rings hollow and tinny and overbright.
This is hope. I am presenting it to you and defending it as the word of the year. And yet: it has sometimes (often) felt impossible. Unwise, certainly.
So here is the last thread: what I am learning now is the corollary to all this: that “a love / to which there is no reply” does not presuppose that you must show your soft belly to the world. It is okay to glue the fox’s jaw shut even as you fix his tooth. Importantly: you don’t have to share your pain with others. Equally importantly: neither do you have to hide it.
The most radical form self-care took for me this year was to be unapologetic about sharing on my own terms: I spoke when it served me, and when it did not, I held my pain close to myself. I experimented with writing (hi friends!) and found that it resonated deeply among those I shared it with. I am (truly) glad and grateful that so many meaningful conversations among my friends grew out of what hurt me, but that was never why I did it; my pain is not a lesson or a primer or an instructional to anyone other than myself. There is room here to challenge the narrative that we earn the right to share our pain if 1) someone else can learn from it and/or 2) it makes it easier to move forward positively. There is room to reframe sharing pain as a radical act of self-care, in pursuit, ultimately, of hope.
You’ve always been tender-hearted, my mom said, and I remember sighing, knowing that I had not yet done the work.
How on earth am I supposed to live in the world?
I’ve done a bit of homework around this topic over the last year or so. I suppose, at the end of the day, you are supposed to live by looking upward and offering the terrifying, unearned and untested trust that what overwhelms you will not kill you. You’ll only be wrong once.
How on earth am I supposed to live in the world? As best you can. No better, no worse.
How on earth am I supposed to live in the world? In such a way that makes it more beautiful.
How on earth am I supposed to live in the world? By caring for yourself, even as you serve.
How on earth am I supposed to live in the world? Without expectation or bitterness around all of the replies that your love does not receive, even as the years teach you all of the ways that your love can spiral outward, unanswered.
In short: you are supposed to live in the world hopefully; you are supposed to live in the world anyway.
It took me a long time to figure out how to open this essay. It was, in fact, the very last thing I did before I edited it for broader consumption. In contrast, I began writing it because I knew exactly how I wanted to end it: the most important thing I’ve learned in 2018 was that, in addition to all of the above, you are supposed to live in the world understanding that your strength comes from all the things that have not killed you. Most importantly of all, you are supposed to live in the world in a way so steeped in self-love and self-care that you cannot help but feel a little hopeful as you warm your shoulders in the light of all the things you’ve survived.
I understand, too, even as I’m writing this, that there are many days where I could read that sentence and it would be about as meaningful to my day-to-day life as the idea that I should live in the world in such a way that the wings sprouting out from above my shoulderblades take me to work instead of a probably-too-small car last washed god-knows-when-is-that-a-blueberry. I understand that there are many days when it feels impossible to seek any sort of warmth or refuge from the things that have hurt us. I also understand — quite viscerally, now — that to talk about hope is to inherently measure the difference between what is and what might be.
I wanted to publish this post on the solstice. The idea of hitting “publish” on the day that the light lengthens spoke to me in a way that still makes me wish I’d gotten my act together in time. Instead, I am going to publish it in that hazy in-between time right before New Year’s, which is 1) a lesson in the idea that no amount of planning matters as much as hitting “publish” and 2) at least as equally fitting. I’m staring down a new year as my head swims with the distance between what I sometimes am and what I am at my best.
(When I think back to all the best days of my life, they’re wildly different. Some are quiet and some are exuberant. Some are solitary and some are overfull. Some are triumphant and some are peaceful. Some are playful and some are loving. I think it’s honestly true that the only quality they all share is that they are all hopeful; when I am at my very best, I am always hopeful.)
The word of my year is hope. It lit the very darkest reaches of a very sad year. It let me look forward anyway. It let me put “a love / to which there is no reply” into a weary world — a practice for which I am endlessly grateful. I’m particularly grateful for its patient nature. It lived, softly and constantly, alongside grief. It grew in the dark; it lived when I did not water it, and waited quietly for me to catch up. It does not demand space or exclusivity; it is secure in its place in the family of things.
Perhaps most importantly, hope manages to at once illuminate 2018 and serve as a map for 2019. A light and a path… what more could we ask for? What else is there? I wish it for you and for me; for the entire weary world, rejoicing.
