Hope

At the start of the year, I was having a flirtation with cynicism.

At both a personal and global level, the lingering half life of hope, the hope that seemed to be dashed daily, well it was all just a bit much.

And so, little by little, rather than moving through this world and my life, tapping into my innate optimism, I’d been doing something different.

And it was exhausting.

I didn’t have a roadmap for this journey of pessimism. So I kept having to stop, and look up the directions. And, I was going against my true north. That’s a bit like cutting fabric against the grain – you can do it but it is so much easier to slide the scissors through when you are working with the cloth rather than against it.

I do have an odd sense that there was an inevitability to my foray into a life lived more cynically. Our fullest selves are made up of lightness and shade. It is helpful to be able to move between the two, learning the rich lessons of both.

So I guess I was always curious what the landscape would look like on the other side of giving up the hope that I might build a family with a lovely fella, or even just find a kindred spirit to share my life with. It takes a lot of energy to front up to each new date with the hope that this person might be a fellow traveller.

And I remember, the night that Kevin Rudd was elected. My face was in perpetual motion – whole-of-face smiles at the idea that we might see change on issues I care about, morphing into the Tony Blair Reality Check Furrow in my forehead as I remembered the disillusionment wrought from the “new left”.

Over the past year I’ve watched the circulation of power among the people our society recognises as leaders – whether in politics, the private sector, religion – and become so very weary of the language of pragmatism that evades accountability for unjust behaviour.

But to be honest, when it comes to cynicism and pessimism, I don’t really like either the journey or the destination.

I don’t think I’m cut out to expect the worst in people. I don’t think it is healthy to shut down my openness to life for fear of getting hurt or not paying the mortgage. Oliver Jeffers wrote a beautiful story – The Heart in the Bottle – that reminds us that we can keep our hearts safe if we put them in a bottle. But in doing so we lose our heartful connection with the world, and then it does indeed become a very bleak world.

That, it seems to me, is the toxicity of pessimism. And, as I’ve journeyed with it in the recent past I’ve come to realise that the half life of hope is a better place to dwell than the half life of despair.

But, hope and despair are bound. Albert Camus said “there is no love of life without despair of life”. And Maira Kalman simply says “We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair.”

So, what does it mean to live with hope-despair-hope-despair?

In part, simply naming the cycle has helped me. This world, and our actions in it: they are genuinely worthy of despair. But, hope brings to our lives the possibility that the bleakness of the current condition can change.

And it changes by our living in hope. And that means something a little different for each and every one of us.

Because, how do you live with hope when, before you even open your mouth, someone has made an assumption about you because you don’t look like them? Or has simply refused to slow the taxi down to pick you up because you are Aboriginal in Australia? Or has beaten you up because you walked down the street holding the hand of your girlfriend in a community that doesn’t welcome same sex partnerships or inter-racial partnerships? Or needs, requires, you to conform to gender stereotypes when you know at the core of your very being that they mean nothing to you?

Rebecca Solnit argues that “hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.”

So, what constitutes this spaciousness of uncertainty? What are the channels to hope in bleak times?

One thing is chronological perspective.

At work I talk about us being on the biggest upswing towards gender equality in two thousand years. And I know, we all know if we stop to think about it, that every second of our existence, we are harmed because of patriarchy. Yes, sometimes it feels like things are going backwards as fast as they are going forward. But (and I recognise the class privilege of the following statement), the fact that I have a mortgage in my own name is one marker of the progress we have made in the past century. So too the fact that I can vote, and three years before I was born, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women were finally also granted the right to vote in their country. But also that, just in my lifetime, the laws have changed so that, if I were married and my husband raped me, I would be able to prosecute him.

Another channel is the inspiration of expansive thinking. I read someone like bell hooks and her piercing critique of the crippling half lives that we all lead when we use patriarchal constructions of emotionality, and I feel hope to think differently. I see it particularly in some of the kids in my life and in the twenty something femos in my life: feminism for them is intrinsically, intuitively intersectional. The gender binaries that framed the essentialism of the mainstream feminism of my education are being pulled apart in the most glorious manner. Do we know yet the way to fully deconstruct the gender binary? No. But isn’t it magnificent to dwell in the spaciousness of uncertainty, exploring, getting things wrong, getting things right, collaborating to find the nextness?

I think also that finding your own practices of resilience are important. In one of my years of profound baby grief (when I didn’t even recognise at the time that I was grieving so deeply) I was held gently by my intrinsic appreciation of beauty. I would take small excursions to vintage markets and find wee trinkets of great intergenerational beauty. I suspect that, even as I failed to leave my own genetic trail, I was looking for evidence that we linger on. But I was also nesting myself. Building a home that is filled with my singular love and joy.

Creating collective resilience and resistance sites is also important. These can be big. They can be small. They can have whole of society justice in their aim. They can have individual change as their starting point. But, the important thing is to gather together and walk into the spacious uncertainty to co-create something new.

Some of you know that I go, from time to time, to an international meeting on women’s human rights at the United Nations. It is a pretty contested site – where the power and might of patriarchy and fear-based religions seek to control women. A couple of years ago we had a team of ten, and in the hallway on the last day we sat and shared an Appreciation Circle. For a full day (as on the inside of the negotiating room they battled over our rights, word by word, comma by comma) we sat on the outside in ritual space. To start with we wrote on slips of paper the things that had made us angry, releasing it in the capital letters, underlines, exclamation points – anger we hadn’t even realised had taken up residence in our bodies. With exhilaration we shredded the paper and flushed it or burnt it. We physically manifested letting the anger go. Diminishing its power to define us. Rejecting the premise of hate and fear upon which it was predicated.

And then we sat in circle, and for every one of us in the group, we shared our words of appreciation – reflecting on the ways we had seen each other expand into our best selves, how we had watched on in moments of vulnerability and seen sometimes failure and sometimes growth, remembering how we had made each other laugh and cry, and feeling our hearts swell with pride and love. We used the Auslan sign for applause (raising your hands and waving them) at the conclusion of each round. An interesting thing happened over time, our crew in the hall started also to raise their hands – joining in our appreciation. We changed the feel of the hallway – we created something new and transformative. Did we start the day knowing we would do that? No. I opened a circle that was spacious, but I also opened a circle that was uncertain. I didn’t know what would happen. And, delightfully, even for all its cheesiness, we rode the love wave. And it rippled out. Neuroscience increasingly shows us that we are what we think. And if we synapse to love, over fear, we have greater power to transform.

So hope-despair-hope-despair. My Dad and Grandfather, good men of the Yorkshire Dales and Scottish lowlands, on the rare days of sunshine, would cast on eye outside and comment on the shadowing, for fear of chasing the sun away by naming it.

One of the challenges of my flirtation was cynicism was that it felt disempowering. Resistance, as we were told by shiny rolling robots in my youth, was futile. And that’s what I love about optimism and hope. We have the capacity to believe that change is possible, and to live our lives in the both the light and shadow of our principles. We are not always successful. We despair. But, if we don’t even try, there will never be any change. We hope.

May 2016