The problem with hope.

Or perhaps it is more a problem with the inconsistent approach we have toward the notion of hope. We, by turns, tell people that they have to have hope and not to get their hopes up. The various and sundry sayings on the topic run the gamut of 'there is no such thing' to 'you can't live without it.' So which is it? Or is it both? Or neither?

I considered the possibility that the difference between not getting your hopes up and having to have hope might lie in the situations that they are used. This didn't seem to work out, however.

We seem to say 'don't get your hopes up' in situations where there actually IS some small possibility that whatever we are hoping for could happen. It might not be probable or likely, but it is not totally impossible. I think we see this frequently in situations with children. It is almost parental code for 'it ain't gonna happen.' It serves to delay likely disappointment, but not much else. The person who says it probably feels fairly certain that the let-down will be coming, but doesn't want to voice the bad news yet. If the hope is that an absent parent will finally, finally come to visit or that Santa will bring a pony, the adult on the spot has a strong idea that neither one is going to happen. So what is accomplished by delaying the disappointment until the non-arrival of the parent or the pony? It could be that the adult also harbors a tiny hope that they will not have to disappoint the child. It could be that they want to protect the child from the inevitable sadness. It could be that they want to delay their own sadness in seeing the sadness of the child until the last moment. But I wonder if it really serves anyone to do so.

The same holds true when adults use it with each other. Perhaps the one saying it has seen the other person face too much disappointment and can't bear the notion that they will be flattened by disappointment yet again.

On the other hand, when things look as if they are irretrievably hopeless, we tell the person that they 'have to have hope.' "There is always hope." Etc. etc. Even when we know for a fact that there is not always hope, the semblance of hope must be maintained. In fact, the more desperate a situation looks, the more we insist that there is hope. A cure may be found. It is only temporary. It's probably not as bad as it looks. It is always said as an attempt to cheer someone up. But absent any evidence that it might be true, it frequently falls flat.

We also are skeptical of anyone who seems to maintain hope in the face of improbable odds. At the very least, we might consider them to be desperate. In the extreme, they are simple or deluded. A perpetual Pollyanna is not taken very seriously.

So what the heck is going on here? I'm not certain by any stretch of the imagination, but the most obvious possibility is that it is a vital survival mechanism. What would happen to someone who truly had no hope? There is at least some chance that they would give up and be able to release the pain of disappointment. If there is no hope, then there is no expectation and it would make the pain of disappointment less. But I think that would only be true of a minority of people. And the effort to reduce pain would also reduce joy.

Even at my most cynical and at the lowest points of my life, there has always remained just a tiny seed of hope that whatever pain or loss was going on would somehow be lessened in the future. It may not, in fact, happen, but being able to anticipate potential improvement in the future can remove enough of the edge of the current pain to carry on into the future. It could be self-delusion or a coping mechanism, but it also could be an innate survival tool. Even if it is delusional, a reasonable amount of hope cannot hurt us in the short term and may help us make it through to a better place.

"Never deprive someone of hope...it may be all they have." -- Anonymous.

Random goodness

Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me." -- Muriel Rukeyser.

My first thought when I read this was that it applied to negative outcomes. We read about plane crashes, natural disasters, illnesses and think 'there but for the grace of God, go I." We collectively and openly recognize that life has a random quality that makes everyone of us vulnerable. Whether it be a large natural disaster or a smaller personal catastrophe, something negative can and most assuredly will happen to everyone at some point. We try not to obsess about it; we try to prepare for it. But there is no way to avoid whatever it is from coming to us, whether 'it' is anything from a minor disappointment up to death. This is so patently obvious that there really isn't much to explore about it.

The other face of this coin bears some looking at, however. We tend to overlook the possibility of good things coming to us just as surely as the bad ones do. I wonder why this seems less the case than it's negative counterpart. When we hear of someone else's good fortune, we can feel glad for them, especially if they are close to us. Frequently, however, we feel envy. And if their good fortune involves something we'd hope to have for ourselves, the envy can expand to very ugly proportions.

Why is this? I think it comes from a combination of things. Partly it is a result of deep-seated cultural ideas about the 'haves' and 'have nots.' And partly, I think it comes from a collective sense of scarcity that reaches into our psyches beyond material needs.

The Calvinism of the Puritan colonists on this continent left a mark of predestination imprinted on our collective memories. What you had in the way of material goods was an illustration of where you stood in God's opinion. Wealthy folks obviously deserved what they had and poorer people obviously deserved to have nothing. On the face of it, especially put this baldly, we would reject this notion. But there still seems to be a tinge of it remaining in our subconscious, at least among those who are seen to have more than the usual share of benefits. This, and other historic cultural traits such as regal and clerical hierarchies, leave a deep rift between the favored few and the teeming masses.

With the end of monarchies and state established religion, we did not escape the structure or the belief that everyone has his or her place. Here in the United States, and perhaps other places, we are fed the dizzying notion that anyone can succeed in whatever they choose if only they work hard enough. But, like our Puritan ancestors, we also look down on those who fail to do so, assuming that they just haven't worked hard enough to merit the better things. I think this provides us some mental insulation from the notion that there is a random element to success as well as to failure. The good things in our life must be dependent solely on our efforts or they could disappear. It has also been used to oppress various parts of the population, but that it another topic entirely.

The other problem tends to lie in a deep-seated belief that there is scarcity in everything. It is as if, if you have something there is not going to be enough for me to have the same thing. And to safeguard our futures, we must continue to stock pile more and more, leaving less for others. Or so the thinking goes. But is this notion of scarcity true? I doubt it. I think the problem lies more with the fact that we seem to have collectively lost the concept of having enough. There is a huge industry whose sole job is to convince us to buy more and more stuff and generate perceived needs. And constant bombardment of their messages simply has to have a huge influence or else they wouldn't continue to do it. Many years ago I read a book by (I think) Alan Watts. In it he wrote about how our culture had substituted amount for quality in our property. And I think this also applies to the more intangible parts of life. We can't be happy for others' successes because, on some level, we think it means that they have somehow taken the success that we wanted to have.

But whatever reason lies beneath our understanding, we do not seem to believe that random, unexpected joys can come to us just as surely as tragedies. We seem to only see the lacks in our lives rather than the abundances. There are those fortunate souls who do revel in the joys rather than the pains, but for many of us there is the perpetual 'yeah, but' quality to our appreciation of what is in our lives. I got X, but I really wanted X+Y and therefore, I can't fully enjoy the X that I do have. Perhaps this is human nature. Maybe it is the motivation for human beings to continue reaching forward in our evolution. It could also be something else entirely. No matter what it is, I think we would better serve ourselves by finding some way of shifting our focus more towards the good we have, rather than dwelling on the tragic.

I'm not certain how to do this and, like most things, it probably needs to be different for everyone. Some folks are list makers, some reflective and still others make resolutions to change things about themselves and their outlooks. But no matter how it might be implemented, I feel certain that we could enhance our daily lives by living in hopeful anticipation of the random goodness rather than dreading the random arrival of tragedies.

The Wind and Longing

The wind has been a spiritual metaphor for many things in my life. Today it speaks to me of longing. In all its various guises, it stirs gentle memories and raging passions, joyous laughter and wistful sighs.

In its lightest, most elusive form, a breeze that barely flutters a leaf, it carries a snippet of a forgotten tune or the whiff of long ago cooking drifting through a youth with rare pleasures. It teases out partial memories and gently tugs out a desire for days that cannot return, for things that should have been, for people who should have stayed. It is the quiet voice of loss that never is totally silenced.

Another is like the cool breeze of spring, moving the grass with waves of hopeful promise of what yet might be. Stirrings of new life skirting through the trees carrying the scent of turned earth and budding flowers and disappearing down the lane, leaving a laughing invitation to follow in its wake. Running after it to discover what is just beyond our sight, offering promises of new joys.

Most invigorating perhaps are the roaring passions of the storm winds, stirring up feelings of depth and intensity that awake awareness of life lived to its limits in ways the breeze cannot even hint at. It couples power and risk, offering those who are not too timid to reach for fulfillment, if only they will dare. It blows away the dross and leaves a landscape cleared of the usual, offering new perspective and new possibilities.

There are long, lonely winds that whistle at our windows on cold evenings. These winds keen to us of loneliness and loss. Like mourners crying low in pain, they resurrect old sorrows and current emptiness and refuse to subside for their season.

Even the lack of wind leaves its own special longing. The hot, stuffy days, when there is no movement, feel pregnant with waiting -- waiting for the merest stir of the air which signals relief. And that relief could come in the slightest of breezes or the strongest of tornadoes, any movement at all that would disperse the stagnation and weight of humidity and heat. Setting in motion the desire for change at, almost, any cost.

Each longing has its own wind, its own time, its own expression. The winds of relationship seem to be ever present, if variable in type. There are very few places in life or on earth that have the same wind at all times. But the wind itself is constantly present, just as longing within the human heart is always present. And I notice which wind of longing is blowing and from which direction in the same way that a sailor must. I also wonder which way it will shift and what corrections in course I will have to make in order to accommodate it.

President Obama

There are moments and events that are so full that they defy description; words fail, language limps and there are not enough adjectives. And pity the poor writer who feels compelled to make the attempt to put it into words. Last night in America, we had such a moment.

Old enough to have been aware during the 1960's, I recall the marches and the assassinations, the riots and the killings. I grew up in a time when those who would use the "N" word, did so with impunity. And a fight between teenage boys was termed a "racial incident" by the school administration rather than just the usual teenage stupidity. And I can't help but believe that just beyond the veil, untold numbers of those who died, perhaps without hope of this day ever arriving, are proud of what we, as a people, did yesterday.

And I consider the spirit of all of those whose participation enabled this to happen. All of those regular people, like myself, who contributed whatever they could in money or time so that hope could have its day. And then backed up their commitment by standing in long lines to fulfill their sacred civic duty by voting. We Americans like to think of ourselves in terms of our highest ideals; liberty, democracy, equality. And, in the past, we have all too often succumbed to giving these ideals mere lip service. Yesterday, we collectively not only remembered who we are, but acted on it. We stood up to say that we care what happens to each other. That hope is stronger than fear. And that, if we bind ourselves together, we can accomplish great things.

As I listened to how people around the world held their breath with us and felt happy for us, I felt profoundly grateful that we are now a step more closely linked to the family of man. As I received the congratulations of friends and acquaintances from the Middle East and Africa and Canada and Europe, I felt so proud of our country and of my small contribution to making this come about.

While watching Barack's speech last night, I saw a man who, while happy, was fully aware of the heavy responsibility he had just shouldered. I saw a good man, a thoughtful man, a man who has just sacrificed so many of the daily, mundane joys usually enjoyed by husbands and fathers across this country for the sake of this country. And I am filled with the deepest respect for and gratitude to him for this. And, I believe, that just as we came together to elect him, we must stay together to work for the hopes and dreams that we all voted for yesterday. We cannot send him on his way and expect him to do all the work. That is not what this is about. That is not what America is about. We must continue the effort well past January 20, 2009 and make our aspirations a reality for ourselves, our children and for those who follow us. We've picked up the gauntlet along with Barack and we can not put it down again. Last night's exuberance cannot be allowed to become today's complacency.

There is much for us yet to do. It's time for us to roll up our sleeves and get to work.