Hope is Not a Prediction, Episode 259
How do we hold together two truths - that there is so much to be deeply concerned about, and that we have within us many gifts with which we can respond - without collapsing into pessimism or naive optimism?
And how do we find something in our lives and in one another that puts us in contact with those very gifts so that - even if the outcome is far from certain, or even far from what we want - we can still respond?
This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Here's our source for this week:
Hope is not Prediction
“F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” but the summations of the state of the world often assume that it must be all one way or the other, and since it is not all good it must all suck royally. Fitzgerald’s forgotten next sentence is, “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
You wonder what made Vaclav Havel hopeful in 1985 or 1986, when Czechoslovia was still a Soviet satellite and he was still a jailbird playwright. He said then, “The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prediction. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”
The despair that keeps coming up is a temporary inability to work for these things that are good, a loss of belief that the task is meaningful. That loss comes from many quarters, from exhaustion, from a sadness born out of empathy, but also from expectations and analyses that are themselves problems.”
Rebecca Solnit, from ‘Hope In The Dark’
Photo by martin bennie on Unsplash