I’ve seen more than the usual amount of material about having hope, lately.
I see why, of course. Many people view hope as an incentive to carry on when things are going badly and they can’t change that.
So, hope serves as a forward path or guiding light, a way to keep going when you’re not sure you’re going to wind up anywhere good.
Speaking as a long-term survivor of a pretty rotten condition, I certainly understand the value of that!
The point, I’d say, is the forward path itself, the guiding light that gives us the idea of having something positive to go for, when the usual ideas and activities don’t work or make things worse.
Hope is one way, but not the only way. Sometimes hope is counterproductive, and if you’re convinced that hope is the only way to keep going, that can be a real downer.
To me, hope is like a pretty lie: I’d like to believe it, but there’s no logical support for the hopeful ideas that, for instance, I could attain full remission and be able to work to support myself again, that the Atlantic circulation will strengthen again and stave off total disaster, or that my country could look forward to a survivably rational government in the new year.
And yet, some people cherish those hopes in themselves, and who am I to persuade them otherwise? Their futures are for them to envision. I’ve got to deal with my own, and that’s plenty!
My own sense of a forward path is something I have a hard time articulating…
It depends partly on the deep sense of history I grew up with, 10,000 years of the ebb and flow of human vanity, decency, terror, greed, and stunning insights.
I’ve read notes and letters from people burying their entire families in the Black Plague… between king and lord of warring states… Spanish merchants discussing trading alliances along the Great Lakes in North America in the mid-1300s, very hush-hush… Gilgamesh and his passionate grief for Enkidu… love songs from every age and between every gender… desperate missives from ancient Romans fleeing the fall of their government to families who never answered them, or told them there simply wasn’t enough to go around and still keep everyone else in their accustomed style and comfort.
Whatever we suffer, we are not alone in it. We are one more part of a very long course of events, and every problem has been faced before. It’s up to us to find the best solution for this particular version at this moment in time – and we have this great depth of information about how it has been faced before.
We are never alone in our terror, betrayal, or pain. Somehow, that helps me.
Another part is that – another lesson from history – there is a future worth having, if you can stay alive long enough and do what it takes to increase your odds.
This alone has gotten me through some things that should have been terminal: I had to see what the future worth getting to would be. So far, it’s been a fantastic outcome, relatively speaking. Well worth getting to!
The last thing, which is the hardest to explain although it’s the easiest to notice, is my stubborn idea that it’s my job to hew my best and truest path through this life – do my best while being honest about my capacity, be guided by my humane ethos, keep the long view, and don’t let the misery of my circumstances decide how I’m going to face them. That job belongs to my will. It has had a lot of practice.
Sounds really noble or something. It sure doesn’t feel noble! It feels messy and rebellious and defiant, most of the time. It requires me to disrupt expectations about how women, who are middle-aged women, who are white middle-aged women, who are white middle-aged women who originated from upper-middle social strata and good education… should behave. In short, people who are supposed to have options and protections and resources that I haven’t even been able to dream of for a very long time.
That’s what I felt I should have been. It’s a useless “should”, but a gluey one.
For all that I’m pretty cheerful (especially with the morning sun on my face, like now), I don’t have much truck with “hope”, because it feels like placing too much weight in an imaginary basket. I can bank on my diligence, curiosity, and determination, though. They aren’t imaginary at all; this blog reminds me of that.
I think that every one of us has to find the forward path or guiding thought that works for us individually in our own ways.
We’ve each got to play to our own strengths, and do our best to keep the deep-dyed “should” phrases in their place.
Sometimes hope is just another “should”, and it’s okay to set it aside for other motivators. You’re still whole without it.
Maybe it helps to know that the Darwinian statement, “survival of the fittest,” does not mean those who have the strongest minds or the healthiest bodies – despite the narrow libertarian/right-wingy assumptions and the hunter-gatherer-based ideas of cost/benefit.
It means “those most able to adapt to fit the new environment” and that, dear reader, means us: the disabled and neurodivergent are the OG adapters to strange environments, the fittest to figure out how to handle the increasingly worrying future.
One way or another, this era in history – with its uncertainties, intensity, and rising waves of change – is ours. Like it or not.
Collectively, we can do this. Individually, as ever, it’s an open question – but let’s find out.
I’m curious how this will go…