Wrestling with Hope as a Social Change Leader
I’ve been wrestling with hope a lot lately. What about you?
It started with a colleague’s new year email that ended with: “wishing you hope (the active kind).”
The active kind. Hm.
The next day, my inbox has this message from The Marginalian—one of the three newsletters I subscribe to—a re-post from 2016: Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change.
Dark times. Social change. Hm.
As if that were not enough, on a call with a potential client I asked what their biggest challenge was right now…he responded, “Our staff just needs a little hope.”
Just. Hope. Hm.
Honestly, I was taken off guard. How dare hope enter like that, out of the blue? How could hope show up in this time of constant reminders that everything is falling to pieces?
I know you don’t need me to enumerate the horrors that we humans are living, experiencing and being right now. We are, like Grandma would say, going to Hell in a handbasket. And if you doubted it, just look at your feed.
All I could think was: Very funny, Universe. Thanks so much for multiple mentions of this mercurial, aspirational, cure-all virtue. Real helpful.
Then, I remembered a piece I read a few years ago by Margaret Wheatley. I unearthed it from my files and refreshed my memory. Basically, she takes a pretty dark angle to say: Yeah, everything is destroyed. Don’t bother sitting around, wishing and expecting things to improve. They won’t. Humans have done and continue to do irreparable damage to each other, to the planet and all its inhabitants.
Halfway through the article, I felt a bit vindicated—See? Hope. Heh. Not a thing to spend time on.—And also completely depressed. Good thing I read to the end. I knew there was a reason this piece stuck in my mind. It was not for the doomsday vibe.
Once we grapple with the fact that things are bad, irreversible, not going to be a sunny-happy ending, we can stop wasting our time and energy waiting for the upswing. Wheatley comes through with an Albert Camus-like proposal to embrace the bleakness and use it to offer richness in doing what we can do, where we are, with what we have right now.
She proposes that we pour our energy and effort, our time on this planet into love and generosity, and commit to Vaclav Havel’s revised definition of hope that focuses on the horizon rather than the finish line.
Love. Generosity. Hm.
I appreciate the guidance to direct my energies into love and generosity. Somehow those feel more tangible, more doable, more in the moment. And also not candy-coating or avoiding the horrible realities of where we are right now.
So I wanted to share this with you, in hope that you will find some solace, some assurance, some connection. You are doing difficult and important work in the world. And, you are not alone.
Hold on to this quote to keep you going this week:
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well. It is the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.”