The world seems to be in such a catastrophic state. Where is the hope? What is hope?
So, what is hope, and what is hope for? Hope is an emotional temper that emboldens the heart to be active, it is a condition, a mood, an aura of being. It is a feat of the imagination, both courageous and ingenious, a vitality that inspires us to take innovative action to defend the world. Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing.
We achieve this vitality of spirit by rejecting the relentless promotion of despair and opening our eyes to the beauty of things, however imperilled, degraded, or difficult to love the world may appear to be. We try to view the world not as it is packaged, presented and sold to us but as we imagine it could be. We do not look away from the world, we look directly at it and allow the spirit of hope – the necessary driver of change – to inspire us to action.
I wrote in Faith, Hope and Carnage, “Hope is optimism with a broken heart.” This means that hope has an earned understanding of the sorrowful or corrupted nature of things, yet it rises to attend to the world even still. We understand that our demoralisation becomes the most serious impediment to bettering the world. In its active form, hope is a supreme gesture of love, a radical and audacious duty, whereas despair is a stagnant rejection of life itself. Hope becomes the energy of change.
I’ve honestly felt very little hope lately, mostly because of gestures around.
This morning has been no exception, so I was happy for Fr. Cave to deliver this to my inbox first thing.
Hope and Abundance
Of those qualities of that which is beyond, a sense of hope and an abundance mentality are of significant importance.
Subheads: Gratitude, Generosity, Assuming the Best, Creativity. These are the actions I can take to rekindle hope. I started this morning with the eye-roll-inducing trope of a gratitude list.
Generosity: I need to devise some new, not-necessarily-monetary ways to be generous. My family’s burn rate has really inhibited this activity in my life lately.
Assuming the Best: I need some practical methodologies for this, as I basically default to assuming the worst.
Creativity: This one has suffered as well since hitting the 3 kids mark. All I’ve had in the last decade is my blog writing, the brief stint of more fiction writing in 2020, and the one show in 2023. The side hustle software projects are creative, but less so, mostly fiddling with APIs and DevOps.