15 hope
“To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on your futures, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.” - Rebecca Solnit
“Never give up. Never surrender.” - Galaxy Quest
Given how the last couple of weeks have gone, I thought it would be nice to start off the week with a little note about hope. I want people to understand that hope is absolutely essential to responding to this moment.
I’m going to start with a few things that hope is not.
Hope is not an emotion.
Hope is not delusional or idealistic or optimistic.
Hope has nothing to do with the probability of a particular outcome.
"Hope is a discipline."
Mariam Kaba often says this. She learned it from a nun who was talking about how each of us must be “of the world and in the world.” Hope requires acceptance of (not agreement with) what is happening in the world. A bearing witness to the realities that are so often painful and destructive and a decision to move forward that requires work that we do every day.
Hope embraces uncertainty.
Writer Rebecca Solnit talks about hope as "an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of the optimists and the pessimists." There is a recognition "that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, what and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone." Hope is rooted in reality and acceptance of the current moment and moving toward what is possible and what is necessary, focused on values (not on likelihood of success).
Hope is expansive and collective.
Hope requires that we think beyond winning and beyond ourselves.As Jewish tradition teaches, “You are not obligated to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.” (Pirke Avot 2:21). Hope is not about us. Our world is so focused on the individual that we do not understand that the role we play in a given situation might not be around for the whole story. Look at any liberation movement. They are long. Hope requires thinking beyond our own timeline.
Hope is action.
Rebecca Solnit writes that "Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope…they feed each other." Hope is the belief in the yet to be. Hope is the understanding that we are not there yet and that we are responsible for moving it along. We don’t get to “just hope;” we have to live hope.
Hope is balance.
Having hope requires being connected to the wholeness of life. We often talk about hope in the context of difficult or dark times. (Not a lot of talk about hope from folks when things are good.) Often the realities we are facing (like now) are painful and scary. They are rage-inducing. They are numbing. Those feeling are essential elements of hope and yet they are not all there is. We must continue to live our lives - celebrate birthdays, other milestones, and successes, play, dance, sing, rest. Something an artist shared with me that she heard in organizing circles in Mexico “Defender la alegria y organizar de la rabia.” We must defend our joy and organize around our rage. We cannot sustain hope when focused solely on the difficulties or the darkness. We must engage with it all.
Hope is the direction in which we orient ourselves while living in this moment.
Pete Buttigieg (I don’t often quote politicians) recently said: “You are not powerless, and he is not unstoppable. Look at, and learn from, the funding freeze and how quickly he was forced to surrender.”
And because sometimes we just need something a bit more concrete than words, this article from Waging Nonviolence includes a number of examples of hope - throughout history, what has happened in just the past couple of weeks (and this isn’t even everything), and what we can continue to do: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/02/we-are-stronger-than-we-think/
Do not give in to despair when they succeed. That’s what they want. When you can feel hope dissipating and nothing else is working, dig deep (or not so deep) for your teenage, contrarian, adversarial self - Hope for no other reason than it’s the opposite of what they want.
You got this. And, if you don’t, we got you,
e
won't you celebrate with me, Lucille Clifton
won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
[originally written 2.10.2025]
