About Hope
I had led several daylong workshops on climate change for our Region without being able to see that they’d made much difference. So I decided to try a different angle and focus on hope, and I led a half-day workshop on this topic. We worked on early hope, early defeats, and the walls we build.
I spoke about our early defeats, how we kept hoping, and how at some point we were forced to set up walls around our lives. From then on, we felt able to hope only within those narrow limits. I challenged us to go outside them. Doing this involves facing why we had to accept them and noticing that those conditions are no longer there.
We began life full of hope. We expected good things (benign reality). We expected to be welcomed. We expected to be powerful. We expected our powerfulness to be welcomed.
Our needs were not all met, but we kept hoping that they would be. We kept trying to communicate what we wanted. In order to get enough attention to move forward, we eventually had to accept that there would be “walls” around our life. The walls were our parents’ patterns and the patterns of the culture and oppressive system we lived in. We still had hope, but our hopes were much smaller. We only hoped for things that could fit within the walls. We were like prisoners who have found a way to live. We are still this way. We hope the next meal will be edible. We hope the “guard” will behave like a human being today.
Now and then there’s a window in the wall, and we start to hope for escape. With the love of a person, with a new project, with a new house, a holiday, a promotion, couldn’t we go outside the walls? Couldn’t we be free? Frozen needs can point the way to real contradiction [to distress], but usually attempting to fill them still leaves us inside the walls.
The imprisoned person, the little child still inside of us, needs us, as an adult, to offer hope outside the walls and to decide to get out.
HOPE BEYOND DEATH
Hope does not end with our individual death. It seems to me that death is not necessarily bad. During an operation in which I was conscious, my blood pressure fell alarmingly, and I felt as if I was going to die. I could tell [perceive] that the surgeon and his team cared about me. They were kind. And I felt like it would have been all right to slip away in their care. That was a useful experience (but I’m glad I survived it).
Our goals, and our hopes can be for the whole of humanity, for all living things, and for the ecosystems we all depend on. They can be for the people we love, for the cultures we are part of. There are many things to hope for that continue beyond our individual death. This perspective has helped me face the climate emergency and act against it.
THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY AND HOPE
Climate breakdown can look hopeless, which can make it deeply unattractive to think about. The power to change things can seem entirely in the hands of irrational people and robotic corporations, which can restimulate feelings from our early lives. It’s restimulating that humans have neglected and spoilt our collective life on this planet. It’s restimulating that things are likely to get worse, that the situation is perilous for present and future children.
A perspective that is helpful to me is that we are in the middle of the most interesting and meaningful adventure we could possibly imagine. As the climate and society break down, the terrible wrongs done over many generations are being revealed, and more and more people are uniting to oppose them. These are grounds for more hope, not less. Reaching for hope will bring up feelings of despair for discharge. What a gift!
As a last resort, if we earth dwellers continue to mess things up, and all our movements for change are not enough, there’s still hope that somewhere in the immeasurable universe there are intelligent beings who won’t mess things up.
It is possible to face our every regret and still have hope.
Bristol, England
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders in care of the environment
(Present Time 204, July 2021)