Hope is What We live for
A few years ago I started ending conversations with a question: ‘What are you counting as your despairs, and where are you finding your hopes?’ Quite often, I found the answer was that despair and hope were not so much opposites as they were bound together, engaging in a little dance of contradictions, the dance of hope. This is the base of my hope.
To me, hope is neither idealism nor optimism. It is a far cry from wishful thinking. And so, hope is a muscle, a practice, a discipline:
To engage with the world not as we might wish it to be, but as it is; to engage with eyes unblinkered by hope, nor shuttered by despair.
We are ambivalent beings, and we cover fear with rage and despair with violence. Growing is seldom simple, nor ever straightforward. It’s a long, uncertain road toward the full embodiment that our species name, wisdom often comes when we hold seemingly contradictory realities in an imaginative dialectic: power and vulnerability; birth and death; pain and hope; beauty and breakage; mystery and certainty; softness and fierceness; yours and mine.
Even the smallest spark can ignite a brighter future.
Perhaps the world is trying to slip backward, to throw us back into darkness. Hope tells me otherwise: that it is trying to be born. Our new strangeness is our ugliness and our betrayal, but our courage, our creativity, and our precious dignity are in there too. All around me, I see lives fashioning connections across the divide, finding new life from the rubble of its ruins.
I am continually struck by the larger story of this century: despite our well-known problems and decline, a lot is quietly happening in our learning and growing wisdom.
How we think about ourselves, how we come to know, plan, and envision more complex social units and systems than ever existed before, how we negotiate our lives in and with the biosphere — in self- and social understanding, and in science itself, today we are using concepts that didn’t even exist, much less make their way into the larger conversation of the world.
In the past, we learned to move forward by breaking apart bodies and minds, spirits and land, knowledge and knowers. We perfected systems of making ‘us’ versus ‘other’, and the natural world was separated and disconnected. Moving forward, as we continue to study the workings of our brains and explore the cosmos and the deep Earth, we can see that we live in flesh and bone inseparable from the living, breathing systems of the land. Life, in all its complexity, always leans toward wholeness: a living body-world that contains, connects, and is the world we make and continue to make.
Every once in a while, stop long enough to take a collective, long, shocked breath.
We are the cultural coming-of-age generation-defining core human terms such as community, marriage, gender, etcetera. Even as we seemingly retreat into tribalism and binary thinking, we are in life after life softening those lines. For all the ways that digital technologies may be dividing and isolating us, they also contain the beginnings of tools to start thinking and behaving as one species.
So, let us hope and work for a better place!
