Hope for dummies (revolutionaries)

Dear Reader,

In a recent conversation, my beloved friend A confessed that she knows there is hope, but she can’t feel it in her body. I knew what she meant. Her words stayed with me for the rest of the week, prompting me to think about the difficulty in turning our thoughts into feelings, and in extension, the difficulty in turning dreams into reality. If you call yourself a revolutionary, you must do both.

As revolutionaries, we don’t just want to feel hopeful. We want to act from hope consistently so we can tend to the future. Radical, transformative and just action demands us to imagine the future differently and believe, with a fervor close to delusion, that it is possible to co-create a kinder world.

But many of us have had reason to question this belief in a better future. I’m sure I don’t need to list the disasters, pandemics, and fascisms here. If you are living on Earth in 2025, you know—it’s not a vibe.

How do we feel hopeful so we can not only keep living in this dystopia, but live with purpose? First, we have to take a deep breath. (Did you do it? I’ll know if you didn’t)

Second, we have to find one thing that makes us go Oh in wonder. The more specific, the better. It could be the golden hour on your drive back home from work. It could be a beautiful botanical book cover. It could be the slight smile in your lover’s eyes whenever they’re around you. These everyday wondrous things unlock our imagination. They build our capacity to imagine tomorrows, alternative and kinder realities.

In paying attention to at least one wondrous thing every day, we begin to transform our innermost emotions and automatic thoughts. With time, after months, likely years of practice, we begin to feel lucky (Yes, lucky) to be living in this mysterious, expansive life and taking part in its creation.

I suppose I’m talking more about wonder than hope, but I believe they hold hands. Hope can be hard to access because we put so much pressure around having hope, nurturing hope, growing hope. Of course we’re not going to feel it; we constantly expect to have it.

Hope is perhaps the result of a hundred days of wonder.

When we practice wonder, we can embrace the unknown and the unknowable, where possibility lies. I know the world is tragic, but you are here. Whether you call yourself a revolutionary or not, your actions ripple outwards infinitely. The possibilities available to you are endless. What will you choose? Who will you choose to be with? What do you want the future to be? Write it down. I will meet you there.