What is hope?\u00a0 What inspiration within us does hope bring?\u00a0 For the longest time, it has felt like an endless age of pain and misery.\u00a0 We could point to the abuse and the abusers,\u00a0 we could explain why what was occurring was wrong, but we couldn’t stop it from happening.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Our tears fell on the streets, and parks spread across thousands of miles but unified through common causes.\u00a0 We scraped together what resources we had left for a moment of hope,\u00a0 for a period to try to stop the bleeding.<\/p>\n
Hope in and of itself is as hollow as fear.\u00a0 Hope does nothing to nourish you on its own.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Hope is the awareness of potential progress.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There are no illusions about the monumental tasks that lie before us, only our ability to achieve them.<\/p>\n
People are capable of a great many things.\u00a0 Some reach for the stars, while others nurture in meaningful everyday ways.\u00a0 It takes us all to make it happen, and it is tragic we’ve been reduced to wishing merely to stop being hurt.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
When President (Elect) Biden was announced as the winner of the 2020 election,\u00a0 London set off fireworks,\u00a0 Paris rang church bells, and Germany celebrated a defeat of Fascism.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I found mental clarity to write this, a visual art piece, and an audio project – the trifecta.\u00a0 Days like this are rare,\u00a0 and it is less a belief in positive outcomes but a reprieve from negative ones.\u00a0 If it wasn’t for anxiety regarding someone important in my life, I might be happy today :).<\/p>\n
As I watch the shadows from the afternoon sun get longer, I am reminded this moment is fleeting.\u00a0 Vigilance isn’t enough, as evil will always look for new ways to prevail, as clearly demonstrated by recent history.\u00a0 We must, then, be determined not just to be principled but innovative.\u00a0 The problems of tomorrow will resemble yesterday’s challenges in specific ways, people will be people, but they will also be different.\u00a0 As much as some believe we had reached perfection in ages past and try to prevent progress,\u00a0 we continue to evolve into a better version of who we can be.<\/p>\n
Hope is an interesting concept.\u00a0 Perhaps, it is the most potent empty word there is.\u00a0 Hope is powerless without action.\u00a0 One can sit with idle thoughts of how things could be, but that accomplishes nothing.\u00a0 Hope, like faith, can’t be reasoned or bargained with; it isn’t a rational thing.\u00a0 Sometimes one feels like hope is all they have left, and they need to cling to it or be lost to despair forever.\u00a0 However,\u00a0 being we give ourselves meaning every day through our actions,\u00a0 we fill hope with meaning.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Hope is a reflection of us and can be wielded for wonderful or terrible things.\u00a0 Hope has been perverted by charismatic people to be wielded against their self-interest through lenses of fear.<\/p>\n
We can’t put a finger on hope, but we know it when we feel it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The result is out of our control.\u00a0 We’re waiting for a text message, a phone call,\u00a0 a sports play, the answer to a question, the doctor to return with news,\u00a0 and our focus, no matter how we try to shift it inexorably returns to this important thing or event.\u00a0 When it finally happens, the emotional dam bursts, and the release is unstoppable.\u00a0 We react differently as we all have our quirks, but very few of us sit stone-faced and unaffected.\u00a0 That cycle is us being human, assigning meaning to things, and demonstrating it.\u00a0\u00a0 Afterward comes things like forgiveness or celebration, depending on what happened.<\/p>\n
I think it can be easy to feel fewer and fewer things have meaning.\u00a0 The world feels both bigger and smaller as time goes on, and people struggle to find themselves and their place in the world.\u00a0 Perhaps hope is that it’s our very human mechanism of assigning meaning to the positive spectrum of life.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Happiness isn’t actionable; it just is.\u00a0 Joy or Contentment is the result of hope fulfilled, of a return on investment.\u00a0 We place meaning, hope in any number of things, and receive varying degrees of positive satisfaction when it happens,\u00a0 whether it’s a sincere compliment from a little girl to millions of people coming together to do what’s right.<\/p>\n
We yearn to grow; we desire to learn; we dare to question.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We ventured into the cold and the dark.\u00a0\u00a0 When we learned how to start growing our food, we didn’t produce one thing in one place.\u00a0 We exchanged seeds and knowledge with each other and developed agriculture as a species-changing paradigm.\u00a0 \u00a0The people building new technologies,\u00a0 refining existing ideas,\u00a0 and launching new ventures are all filled with hope.\u00a0 Whether watching a spacecraft launch or a young person perform on a national stage, we sit with the quiet hope of success.\u00a0 Hope is the mechanism of meaning.\u00a0 By itself, hope is empty, hollow, meaningless.\u00a0 It is up to you, and me, to give it meaning and act on it.\u00a0 Be hopeful.<\/p>\n
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P.S. – I love these ‘Dear Diary’ pieces.\u00a0 In writing this, ‘Hope is the mechanism of meaning.’ was an idea that hit me as I was writing.\u00a0 It was one of those ‘light bulb’ epiphany moments.\u00a0 I think reading something that starts as “the absence of abuse is good enough sometimes” to “we can empower ourselves further moving forward”\u00a0 is neat and wholly unintended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What is hope?\u00a0 What inspiration within us does hope bring?\u00a0 For the longest time, it has felt like an endless age of pain and misery.\u00a0 We could point to the abuse and the abusers,\u00a0 we could explain why what was occurring was wrong, but we couldn’t stop it from happening.\u00a0 We formed bonds with each […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[304],"tags":[291,263,168],"class_list":["post-27886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dear-diary","tag-291","tag-anxiety","tag-hope"],"yoast_head":"\n