Hope is not usually cute. Can we just get that out of the way? It's not neat and tidy, not always easy or practical, and it's hardly ever something that shows up on schedule. And yet, hope is the thing I hold tightest to in this life, the thing I turn to when I'm underwater and overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, and sad, and I do that because hope doesn't ask me to just believe everything will be okay because that's a prettier way to live. Hope invites me to step up and out and do the thing that will make that possible. Hope, essentially, is a verb, one that acknowledges everything contrary, but still gets to work holding on to the belief that things can be better - that we can be better.
The last newsletter I sent was in February. FEBRUARY. That feels like a decade ago, and yesterday simultaneously, and maybe that's because everything and nothing has happened in-between. It doesn't make sense, and yet, I know you now. I was getting ready to launch a dream I'd been working on for three years (yes, three years, and yes, my friends who've heard me talk about it that long are saints), and I was so full of hope. Less than a month after I hit send on those words, I was in the hospital battling a terrible internal infection while the whole country, and soon the world, was shutting down as the pandemic spread. We've been facing multiple pandemics since then, we're fragmented, tired, torn. It's a lot. It's a lot, and we don't have to pretend it isn't.
Let me not mince words here - it was hard to hold hope this year, and often, I didn't, but I've got it right now, and I work to keep it close, to offer it to others, to trust they'll do the same when I need it again. Since the early part of this year, I've been making calls each week to members of my community, those who live alone, or need a little extra support, and one of those calls is to my now friend who likes me to read him the news. We've agreed on just a few articles a call, it's all my heart can take, and when we talk about them, his years of life offering a new perspective to what we learn, and my stubborn hope usually pulling us back from the grumps of how gutted we feel about so much of it (we definitely don't agree on everything, and yet we still feel the weariness of the world). Last week I hit my limit before he even picked up, and I said to him, I can't do it, can't hear, read, or see anymore, I just want to skip over it all. He said, “trying to jump over the broken steps breaks your shins on the stairs.” Oof. He told me his dad used to say it to him when he was little, first as a literal warning to “slow his butt [my edit] down on the stairs” and then any time he was rushing through or over something, though he didn't really understand the bigger meaning until his dad said it to him when he was struggling as an adult. Hope doesn't need me to be blind to the world, it needs me to be here, seeing, hearing, helping, not reading every news article, of course, but attending to my neighbors and fixing the broken steps, not merely jumping over and hoping I'll clear the stairs. Someone else will always be on the steps behind me, and hope is what helps me fix the boards so they don't have to worry about falling.
I don't know what this week will bring, and it feels like such a strange time to be offering something new into the world (we'll get to that in a minute), and yet, what better time do we have to carry hope than when we know there will be work to do?
