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Gentle readers, hope is not certainty. If it were, we wouldn't need a different word for it.
I've been hearing a lot of people express despair, the feeling that there is no grounds for hope. And saying as much.
Sweet friends, if you are feeling that way at this point, I would propose your fear is telling you that all that looks like grounds for hope is uncertain, fragile, unreliable, and that therefore you should reject hopeful things because you cannot count on them to be grounds for certainty that all shall be well in the end.
But all hope is uncertain, fragile, and unreliable. That's what hope is. Hope is not the belief that things will be well, it's the knowledge of the chance that they still can be well, they might yet be well, that not all is yet lost.
Hope sits halfway between certainty of rescue and certainty of doom. Hope is a maybe thing.
You want certainty of safety; you want a promise that all this peril will pass and we and all we treasure will make it through okay. I want that too. But it looks like, dear friends, we don't get to have that.
Hope is what you can have when you can't have certainty. It's certainty's consolation prize.
If you will not be comforted by anything less that the certainty that justice and compassion will triumph, then you will not be comforted. Maybe let a little hope in, to accept what solace it may bring? Maybe not discount its grounds for being uncertain, fragile, and unreliable – like all life, itself – and thus rejecting it for being imperfect reassurance? It's not a eagle swooping in to save us. It's just a little ball of fluff that sings.
There is no certainty here. We may all die, and all this beautiful, fragile, blue-green gem of a world. We are fighting for nothing less than continued human existence and every life on Earth. We are fighting for the heart and soul of a nation, for the lives of our neighbors, for the lives of people, of little children, trapped in war zones, for clean air, clean water, clean earth, for justice itself, for the rule of law, for civilization, both such as we know it, and such as our children and grandchildren, wiser than us, might yet dream it given the chance.
We are fighting to save the world. And we may not win.
But we are fighting. Millions of us. Lift up your eyes and see us. See us.
If you don't, you may miss one of the most magnificent things you will get to witness in your lifetime. The people are rising up in the name of justice and of love, all over the earth. People are turning out in the streets for their neighbors.
Don't let fear hide this from you. Don't let it tell you this is nothing, that everything is vanity. It is not nothing. You and I are not nothing.
I can hear some of you out there, butting. "But, but, but..." Your anxiety, your terror, is insistent, demanding obeisance. It is pointing at the great mass of terrible people out there ready to do ill, insisting – insisting – the only acceptable response to this is utter despair.
Is anyone here so reckless as to claim that because there is evil, there is no good?
We must not be transfixed by fear. The end of the world is not a foregone conclusion. Not while we breathe. Not while we may act.
Hope is a choice we make, to look at the twin possibilities of disaster and triumph, and not assume that disaster is inevitable. It isn't to assume, either, that triumph is inevitable. It is to look on the odds, however steep, and say, "And yet." It is to know that, as the sayings have it, the fat lady hasn't sung yet, and the horse might yet learn to.
It's hard not to listen to fear. We humans have had hammered into our neurology, on the anvil of evolution, an exquisite sensitivity to threats. Nothing is louder in our minds than fear, nothing arrests and fixes our attention like the apprehension of peril. This is true for all vertebrates, perhaps even all animals: there may be nothing so crucial for survival than this hard-wired prioritizing of what is bad in an organism's environment over what is good in it. Sweet morsels will wait on us to devour them, until after we have eluded the devouring predators that would make morsels of us. This is as true for us as for the mouse in the field or the dragonfly on the wing. All that lives and feels must care more about what is bad than good if it is to continue living and feeling - and pass on its genes.
So we are all programmed, deep in our minds, to attend to the frightening, the foreboding, the dreadful, over any positive chance. The terrifying possible will always be more salient, more arousing, more rivetting than anything else. Nothing is louder in our minds than fear, nothing ever feels more important.
But in our case, we humans, there is a complication: we can see the future. We can see many futures.
We humans have these magnificent, terrible neocortices, with which we imagine, and forecast, and anticipate, and hypothesize, and envision. This, of course, is a great – if not our greatest – survival adaptation: to know not only what is, but what is not and might yet be. It is a tremendous gift – and a terrible curse.
From what they know, our tremendous brilliant human minds deduce phantasm futures to put before our eyes and in our hearts. When they do, our keen animal minds – our ancient, automatic, and autonomic system for self-preservation – react to these demonic visions as if they were real and present and immediate.
But they are not. They are illusions. They are stories our minds are telling us. They are not false. They are not lies. They arise from a wise and well-educated part of you. But they are possibilities, not destinies. You have them so that you may change them. You are well advised by them. Hearken to them and act on them. But know them for what they are and for what they are not.
That part of you that is soft, and vulnerable, and sensuous, and trembles, that part you must shelter from these nightmare visions, for that animal part of you will become fascinated by them, and unable to wrench its attention away; it will be over-awed by them, and fill your mind with paralytic screaming.
That soft, animal part of you reacts to the actual and the merely possible the same way – unless you can hold on to the difference with your thinking mind. Unless you can remind yourself the possible futures you see are only possibilities, however likely.
Because our magnificent, terrible neocortices also give us the power to question our perceptions, to challenge our automatic reactions. We are not just our animal selves, reacting instinctually and helplessly to all we perceive. We are also these beautiful, amazing, conscious, supple, reasoning minds that can doubt everything up to and including their own existences. We, as these able minds, are capable of looking on these visions of catastrophe and saying, "Maybe so. Maybe not."
These images of the future, they are important. They are informative. They are insightful. They are not real. Not yet. With work and luck, maybe not ever.
Knowing that, chosing to remind yourself of that, is what hope is. That is how you do hope.
And hope is how you do everything else.
This post brought to you by the 125 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.
Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!
"Is there anyone here," he suddenly shouted, "such a fool as to believe that because there is good, there is no evil?"
"There is evil," their triumphant voices called back.
"Then is anyone here," Golias took them up, "so reckless as to claim that because there is evil, there is no good?"
They snagged their breaths on that one. There was a silence which seemed to suck up the air. Then they all spoke, as if under an irresistible compulsion.
"There is good."
The phrase was a moan; and after it was stilled I heard a voice that could only have been that of the emperor. "I remember it," he whispered.
from Silverlock, by John Myers Myers.
Gentle readers, hope is not certainty. If it were, we wouldn't need a different word for it.
I've been hearing a lot of people express despair, the feeling that there is no grounds for hope. And saying as much.
Sweet friends, if you are feeling that way at this point, I would propose your fear is telling you that all that looks like grounds for hope is uncertain, fragile, unreliable, and that therefore you should reject hopeful things because you cannot count on them to be grounds for certainty that all shall be well in the end.
But all hope is uncertain, fragile, and unreliable. That's what hope is. Hope is not the belief that things will be well, it's the knowledge of the chance that they still can be well, they might yet be well, that not all is yet lost.
Hope sits halfway between certainty of rescue and certainty of doom. Hope is a maybe thing.
You want certainty of safety; you want a promise that all this peril will pass and we and all we treasure will make it through okay. I want that too. But it looks like, dear friends, we don't get to have that.
Hope is what you can have when you can't have certainty. It's certainty's consolation prize.
If you will not be comforted by anything less that the certainty that justice and compassion will triumph, then you will not be comforted. Maybe let a little hope in, to accept what solace it may bring? Maybe not discount its grounds for being uncertain, fragile, and unreliable – like all life, itself – and thus rejecting it for being imperfect reassurance? It's not a eagle swooping in to save us. It's just a little ball of fluff that sings.
There is no certainty here. We may all die, and all this beautiful, fragile, blue-green gem of a world. We are fighting for nothing less than continued human existence and every life on Earth. We are fighting for the heart and soul of a nation, for the lives of our neighbors, for the lives of people, of little children, trapped in war zones, for clean air, clean water, clean earth, for justice itself, for the rule of law, for civilization, both such as we know it, and such as our children and grandchildren, wiser than us, might yet dream it given the chance.
We are fighting to save the world. And we may not win.
But we are fighting. Millions of us. Lift up your eyes and see us. See us.
If you don't, you may miss one of the most magnificent things you will get to witness in your lifetime. The people are rising up in the name of justice and of love, all over the earth. People are turning out in the streets for their neighbors.
Don't let fear hide this from you. Don't let it tell you this is nothing, that everything is vanity. It is not nothing. You and I are not nothing.
I can hear some of you out there, butting. "But, but, but..." Your anxiety, your terror, is insistent, demanding obeisance. It is pointing at the great mass of terrible people out there ready to do ill, insisting – insisting – the only acceptable response to this is utter despair.
Is anyone here so reckless as to claim that because there is evil, there is no good?
We must not be transfixed by fear. The end of the world is not a foregone conclusion. Not while we breathe. Not while we may act.
Hope is a choice we make, to look at the twin possibilities of disaster and triumph, and not assume that disaster is inevitable. It isn't to assume, either, that triumph is inevitable. It is to look on the odds, however steep, and say, "And yet." It is to know that, as the sayings have it, the fat lady hasn't sung yet, and the horse might yet learn to.
It's hard not to listen to fear. We humans have had hammered into our neurology, on the anvil of evolution, an exquisite sensitivity to threats. Nothing is louder in our minds than fear, nothing arrests and fixes our attention like the apprehension of peril. This is true for all vertebrates, perhaps even all animals: there may be nothing so crucial for survival than this hard-wired prioritizing of what is bad in an organism's environment over what is good in it. Sweet morsels will wait on us to devour them, until after we have eluded the devouring predators that would make morsels of us. This is as true for us as for the mouse in the field or the dragonfly on the wing. All that lives and feels must care more about what is bad than good if it is to continue living and feeling - and pass on its genes.
So we are all programmed, deep in our minds, to attend to the frightening, the foreboding, the dreadful, over any positive chance. The terrifying possible will always be more salient, more arousing, more rivetting than anything else. Nothing is louder in our minds than fear, nothing ever feels more important.
But in our case, we humans, there is a complication: we can see the future. We can see many futures.
We humans have these magnificent, terrible neocortices, with which we imagine, and forecast, and anticipate, and hypothesize, and envision. This, of course, is a great – if not our greatest – survival adaptation: to know not only what is, but what is not and might yet be. It is a tremendous gift – and a terrible curse.
From what they know, our tremendous brilliant human minds deduce phantasm futures to put before our eyes and in our hearts. When they do, our keen animal minds – our ancient, automatic, and autonomic system for self-preservation – react to these demonic visions as if they were real and present and immediate.
But they are not. They are illusions. They are stories our minds are telling us. They are not false. They are not lies. They arise from a wise and well-educated part of you. But they are possibilities, not destinies. You have them so that you may change them. You are well advised by them. Hearken to them and act on them. But know them for what they are and for what they are not.
That part of you that is soft, and vulnerable, and sensuous, and trembles, that part you must shelter from these nightmare visions, for that animal part of you will become fascinated by them, and unable to wrench its attention away; it will be over-awed by them, and fill your mind with paralytic screaming.
That soft, animal part of you reacts to the actual and the merely possible the same way – unless you can hold on to the difference with your thinking mind. Unless you can remind yourself the possible futures you see are only possibilities, however likely.
Because our magnificent, terrible neocortices also give us the power to question our perceptions, to challenge our automatic reactions. We are not just our animal selves, reacting instinctually and helplessly to all we perceive. We are also these beautiful, amazing, conscious, supple, reasoning minds that can doubt everything up to and including their own existences. We, as these able minds, are capable of looking on these visions of catastrophe and saying, "Maybe so. Maybe not."
These images of the future, they are important. They are informative. They are insightful. They are not real. Not yet. With work and luck, maybe not ever.
Knowing that, chosing to remind yourself of that, is what hope is. That is how you do hope.
And hope is how you do everything else.
This post brought to you by the 125 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.
Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!
Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-01-31 07:26 am (UTC)Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-01-31 01:21 pm (UTC)Sorry to intrude with irrelevance...
Date: 2017-01-31 01:57 pm (UTC)Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-01-31 02:32 pm (UTC)Also, have you ever considered getting on Tumblr? I know lots of that site are a nightmare, but I think posts like this would get a lot of traction and good response there. I think most of my followers there could use these words right now. Do you mind if I post a link to this on mine?
Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-02-02 07:46 am (UTC)Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-02-02 02:13 pm (UTC)Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-01-31 03:16 pm (UTC)Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-01-31 04:35 pm (UTC)Also I have finally unlamed and made a DW account. Feel free to add me as a friend, and thank you for providing the impetus.
Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-01-31 05:13 pm (UTC)Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-01-31 07:32 pm (UTC)Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-01-31 08:01 pm (UTC)Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-02-01 01:24 am (UTC)I would like to share this with others that need it; is there a preferred method for how I should do that, or any places I shouldn't or that you'd prefer I wouldn't?
Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-02-02 07:47 am (UTC)Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-02-01 02:03 am (UTC)Do read the comments on these, because they're where I invite people to share links to articles about things going right that they've found (I'll also tend to dump a linkspam into the comments if it's been a good day for finding articles in my media feeds).
It's available at http://megpie71.dreamwidth.org/.
Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-02-01 02:22 am (UTC)I've discovered these through the process of doing my daily "what went right" post, and I'm sharing them because I think they're useful for other people.
* If you're looking for positive news, good news, news about things which are going right rather than going wrong, start with the news source most local to you. Local news tends to have lots of "little" stories about minor successes and tiny triumphs, the sorts of things which can get choked out of larger feeds by sheer pressure of numbers and the necessity of covering the "big" national or global stories.
* Focus on what went right, rather than what went wrong. I picked this tip up in the first iteration of my "what went right" habit, when I was writing down three things per day that went right in a notebook. I chose "what went right" rather than "good things" or "positive things", because at the time I was in the middle of a depressive slump, and at that point I wasn't cognitively capable of objectively recognising whether something was "good" or "positive" (as a lifelong depressive, I'm constitutionally capable of finding the grey cloud in every silver lining at the best of times). However, I could spot when things were going wrong... so I figured what I needed to do was spot when things were going wrong at going wrong.
* There is a lot of positive stuff going on out there if you just look for it. The thing is, though, you do have to look, because unfortunately it isn't getting blasted across everyone's news feeds the way that the disasters and catastrophes and horrors will be. That doesn't mean it isn't out there. It just means you have to look past the big headlines, and skip past the front pages in order to find it hidden down in the bottom of the lists. (One of the reasons I like the local ABC news feed here in Australia is because it's possible to find a page where their articles are arranged in chronological order - it's labelled "Just In" on their headings - which means you get the stuff which went wrong mixed in with the stuff that went right... and it's sometimes instructive to see the proportions of each).
* People want to share their good fortune with others, even at the worst of times. I think it's something of a human need, this need to share our joys. So find joy, and share it with others. Hope needs to be fed, after all.
Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-02-02 01:37 am (UTC)Now to get this to my American friends. Is it OK to post a link to this entry on LJ? I don't think I'll manage to reach everybody via Facebook.
Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-02-02 07:48 am (UTC)Re: Comment Catcher: About That Thing With Feathers
Date: 2017-02-03 10:46 pm (UTC)Quoting
Date: 2017-01-31 11:57 am (UTC)Re: Quoting
Date: 2017-02-02 07:50 am (UTC)