What is hope? What inspiration within us does hope bring? For the longest time, it has felt like an endless age of pain and misery. We could point to the abuse and the abusers, we could explain why what was occurring was wrong, but we couldn’t stop it from happening. We formed bonds with each other due to collective suffering and oscillated between pondering the origins of all the tragedy and understanding it’s a burden too heavy to bear alone. Our tears fell on the streets, and parks spread across thousands of miles but unified through common causes. We scraped together what resources we had left for a moment of hope, for a period to try to stop the bleeding.
Hope in and of itself is as hollow as fear. Hope does nothing to nourish you on its own. However, after this long period of constant anxiety, consistent pain, and continuous knowledge of life continuously worsening, hope can be the absence of perpetual abuse. Hope is the awareness of potential progress. The existence of our collective challenges is paramount in our minds, as are the underlying conditions, but having the ability to overcome them is invigorating. We are filled with renewed vigor, a restored sense of purpose and direction, and a desire to ‘roll up our sleeves’ to get to work. There are no illusions about the monumental tasks that lie before us, only our ability to achieve them.
People are capable of a great many things. Some reach for the stars, while others nurture in meaningful everyday ways. It takes us all to make it happen, and it is tragic we’ve been reduced to wishing merely to stop being hurt. We’ve been reduced to begging for courts, law enforcement, and other points of power to not live up to the ideals they claim to have. We’ve been reduced to a solemn and regretful understanding that tribalism, be it religious, racial, economic, or other forms of needless division, is going to produce radicalized people who refuse to let those outside their tribe live peacefully.
When President (Elect) Biden was announced as the winner of the 2020 election, London set off fireworks, Paris rang church bells, and Germany celebrated a defeat of Fascism. There are still World War II veterans alive who fought against Fascism, who are now seeing them celebrate us and remind the world that not all hope is lost. I found mental clarity to write this, a visual art piece, and an audio project – the trifecta. Days like this are rare, and it is less a belief in positive outcomes but a reprieve from negative ones. If it wasn’t for anxiety regarding someone important in my life, I might be happy today :).
As I watch the shadows from the afternoon sun get longer, I am reminded this moment is fleeting. Vigilance isn’t enough, as evil will always look for new ways to prevail, as clearly demonstrated by recent history. We must, then, be determined not just to be principled but innovative. The problems of tomorrow will resemble yesterday’s challenges in specific ways, people will be people, but they will also be different. As much as some believe we had reached perfection in ages past and try to prevent progress, we continue to evolve into a better version of who we can be.
Hope is an interesting concept. Perhaps, it is the most potent empty word there is. Hope is powerless without action. One can sit with idle thoughts of how things could be, but that accomplishes nothing. Hope, like faith, can’t be reasoned or bargained with; it isn’t a rational thing. Sometimes one feels like hope is all they have left, and they need to cling to it or be lost to despair forever. However, being we give ourselves meaning every day through our actions, we fill hope with meaning. Hope is an actionable feeling that inspires us positively, or at least shields us from negative, restrictive emotions and enables us to be more of who we are in the places we want to be. Hope is a reflection of us and can be wielded for wonderful or terrible things. Hope has been perverted by charismatic people to be wielded against their self-interest through lenses of fear.
We can’t put a finger on hope, but we know it when we feel it. We’ve felt the time dilation of anxiety when something important to us is as of yet unresolved, and hope is all we have at that moment. The result is out of our control. We’re waiting for a text message, a phone call, a sports play, the answer to a question, the doctor to return with news, and our focus, no matter how we try to shift it inexorably returns to this important thing or event. When it finally happens, the emotional dam bursts, and the release is unstoppable. We react differently as we all have our quirks, but very few of us sit stone-faced and unaffected. That cycle is us being human, assigning meaning to things, and demonstrating it. Afterward comes things like forgiveness or celebration, depending on what happened.
I think it can be easy to feel fewer and fewer things have meaning. The world feels both bigger and smaller as time goes on, and people struggle to find themselves and their place in the world. Perhaps hope is that it’s our very human mechanism of assigning meaning to the positive spectrum of life. Anger is a protective and actionable emotion to negativity; Sadness gives us time and space to process negativity, but how do we assign meaning to positive things? Happiness isn’t actionable; it just is. Joy or Contentment is the result of hope fulfilled, of a return on investment. We place meaning, hope in any number of things, and receive varying degrees of positive satisfaction when it happens, whether it’s a sincere compliment from a little girl to millions of people coming together to do what’s right.
We yearn to grow; we desire to learn; we dare to question. When we started to figure out how to use fire as a tool, we didn’t just keep warm at night and be content as a species. We ventured into the cold and the dark. When we learned how to start growing our food, we didn’t produce one thing in one place. We exchanged seeds and knowledge with each other and developed agriculture as a species-changing paradigm. The people building new technologies, refining existing ideas, and launching new ventures are all filled with hope. Whether watching a spacecraft launch or a young person perform on a national stage, we sit with the quiet hope of success. Hope is the mechanism of meaning. By itself, hope is empty, hollow, meaningless. It is up to you, and me, to give it meaning and act on it. Be hopeful.
P.S. – I love these ‘Dear Diary’ pieces. In writing this, ‘Hope is the mechanism of meaning.’ was an idea that hit me as I was writing. It was one of those ‘light bulb’ epiphany moments. I think reading something that starts as “the absence of abuse is good enough sometimes” to “we can empower ourselves further moving forward” is neat and wholly unintended.