Kindred Spirits: Rebecca Solnit

Hopefulness is not optimism, that’s everything’s going to be fine and we can just sit back.

 

That’s too much like pessimism, which is that everything’s going to suck and we can just sit back.

 

Hope, for me, just means a Buddhist sense of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the fact that we don’t know what will happen, and that there’s maybe room for us to intervene.

 

We have to let go of the certainty people seem to love more than hope, and know that we don’t know what’s going to happen.

 

-Rebecca Solnit, Author

At the start of this new year, there is much uncertainty about the direction of certain areas of my life.

Of course living in the United States, many Americans are feeling this way at a national level.

In fact a dear friend of mine sent me this text on New Years Eve: "Fuck 2017!"

But this uncertainty was amplified for me yesterday at a personal level when an important figure in my life said the following to me about my near future:

"I have a Plan A, B, C, and D for you.  But I can't tell you any of the plans until the 15th."

Living in uncertainty is always challenging.

Read anything by Western Buddhist teacher and author Pema Chodron, and she will soon be talking to you about "the groundlessness" of life; one of her books is actually called "Comfortable With Uncertainty."

It is for this reason that I like the above statement from an interview with author and thinker Rebecca Solnit.

I like that she offers a definition of hope that is so utterly stripped down and unromantic.  I like the link she makes between hope and uncertainty. I like that it is honest.

In a separate piece published in The Guardian in December, 2016, Ms. Solnit wrote the following:

The time when you don't need hope is when your hopes have been fulfilled.

Hope is for when you don't have what you need and for when things are not OK.

It is a belief that liberation might be possible that motivates you to make it more possible, and pursuing hope even when it doesn't lead to the ultimate goal can generate changes that matter along the way, including in yourself.

As we all grapple with our own personal, familial, community, national, international, and inter-galactic uncertainties, I challenge us, I challenge myself, to avoid the default mode of operation of anxiously seeking out secure ground to stand on, and to instead identify the possible places "to intervene."

May it be so.