Hope: not easy but necessary
These are times when hope seems like a fool’s game. It’s hard to be hopeful when you don’t have the president you want, the countrymen you want, the policies you want and maybe not even a world you want. You can point to the melting glaciers, the injustice of new immigration laws, the corruption in law enforcement. You can find a million reasons to justify why this is the worst of all times, and how it’s only logical to be a product of your times and to sink into bitterness and rage, depression and over self-medication. Drug use is up, suicide is up, racism is up. Where will it end?
Life has always been hard. There have always been tragedies and evil politicians. There never was a golden time. There were only times when life was pretty good in one place, while in another there was a war, a famine, an economic crisis or some other horror.
Americans have mostly been protected from national nightmares — yet, we have certainly had our share of them. There were the foundational wars that made us who we are. The Revolution of 1776 must have scared the shit out of a lot of people, particularly those who didn’t support the revolutionaries. There were riots and violence shaking up families and destroying lives. The Civil War brought endless misery, terror and social instability. The Great Depression left so lasting an impression on Wall Street that legend goes they only build new construction with windows you cannot open so brokers can’t fling themselves from high rises as they reputedly did when the Stock Market crashed in 1929. Bank runs, panic, unemployment, bankruptcies, and food lines. We lived through them. And then World War II when every citizen was urged by the government to be part of the war effort by volunteering, taking factory jobs, giving up luxuries to help the soldiers overseas. Not to mention the many other injustices (such as American concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II) and periods of instability (such as the Civil Rights Movement brought, when racists went on rampages that took so many innocent lives). Then was the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s which saw the U.S. government refuse to help the suffering and dying. And then there was 9/11. Americans lived through all of it. We persevered during our darkest historical periods and rebuilt and adapted. Now, unfortunately, we are once again finding out, first-hand, how awful the stress and anxiety of history in the making feels. It sucks!
Boring times, when you don’t see significant divisiveness in a culture, are way better. During unhistoric times, citizens can focus on what they do best: create families and pursue personal happiness with gusto. In historic times, though, things change so quickly it’s hard to maintain focus. It’s like that scene in the Hitchcock classic, “The Birds,” where the female star is trapped in a diner watching a sequence of catastrophic events unfold before her eyes, her eyes flashing from one horror to the next, as she struggles to grasp the magnitude of the horror.
Things are happening so quickly, it’s as if the world you thought you know, whose stability you once counted on, is now ancient history. Like the actress in The Birds, we don’t know where to focus first because everywhere we look something scary is going on. Depressing headlines smack us in the face everywhere we turn.
But hope is necessary. I’m not saying it’s easy. Maybe it doesn’t even feel possible right now. Still, at a time when many people are stressing out over all the negativity and foretelling doom, I believe in hope. Here’s why.
Hope was made PRECISELY for times like these.
It’s when we are under adversity that we need hope the most. Hope is an innate coping mechanism, built into the human brain. Maybe you’ve disconnected from yours. Maybe you’ve become complacent about hopelessness, assuming it is only logical to be depressed when the news is a putrid shit-sandwich.
It isn’t, though. It’s you feeling sorry for yourself and acting like hope is stupid in this world. All that really says about you is that you are out of tune with real life, and don’t understand anything about human history. History, like life, evolves. It fluctuates. It goes from light to dark very fast, and is filled with obstacles and disappointments but also victories and successes that defy logic.
Hope isn’t as easy to access as lust (zing!) but hope is a natural human defense against hopeless situations and you have it in you, ready to be accessed when you are ready to take the risk of hoping. Cutting yourself off from hope leads to depression and stress. And those bastards create a strain on your life that can alienate you from others and make you question your own purpose in life.
Hope is a natural instinct.
Think of mountain climbers. There is no guarantee they will reach the top. Some people die trying. Yet they train for it, they work hard to get there, and they plan for it all based a hope — not a guarantee — they will do the near-impossible and reach the top. The same is true of athletes. And workers. And soldiers. And parents, too. Everyone is driven by hope to do their best and the hope that they will achieve some mission, whatever form it takes, even when there is no guarantee they will succeed.
They don’t give in to despair because they know that if they lose hope, then nobody else’s hope will get them where they want to go. The hope is inside them because surviving disappointments and failures requires maintaining hope every step of the way. Like the couple who continually fail to get pregnant but keep going for those fertility treatments in hope that one day they’ll work. Or the single mom working two jobs in the hope she can meet all of her children’s needs. Or the cancer patient who endures years of treatment. HOPE drives them. Not guarantees.
There are no guarantees that kindness will be rewarded with kindness, that good deeds will be returned with good deeds, and no promise that you — much less, we, as a society — will ever achieve our goals as we envision them.
The only thing that guarantees failure is when we don’t keep going. Otherwise, as impossible as the odds may seem, there is always a chance for a success, a miracle, a magnificent change. The world we live in is proof of that. Radical social changes, heretofore unimaginable technological changes, cures for diseases that once wiped out entire populations, things people like us once never believed they see, whether it was a way to build global community using computers or the legalization of gay marriage. They all exist today.
What might exist tomorrow if you stick around to see it? Something a whole lot better than this is possible. Maybe even something great.
The more we hope, the more hopeful we feel and the more productive we become. The more we hope, the more the people around us hope too. Grief, a good cry, a pity party, they are all to be expected along the tumultous roads of life. But, in the end, hope is what gets us through the bad times and helps us to forge better times.
Three powerful ways to recharge your hopefulness.
Love.
Do you love a pet, a bff, a partner, a kid or grandkid, your biological or chosen family? Spend as much uninterrupted time with them as you can. Spend an evening talking about the little relaxing stuff. Play games together. Turn up the music and dance with them. Or go someplace relaxing with them and throw yourself into the spirit of the place. Mainly, just BE there. Shut off the machines that chain you to events you can’t control and own the moment you are with them. Be with them to the depths of your being. Hold them and treat them like you might never get another chance to see them. Let them know there’s no place else you’d rather be. Receive their love with an open heart and let go of the world outside your bond. Do it every week, or every day if you’re really stressed out. There is no substitute for the power of positive emotion.
Meditate.
Your meditation doesn’t have to be with Yoga or even yoga-esque. You can meditate with prayer. You can meditate with music. You can meditate while you cook. You can even meditate by doing a hard or boring chore that requires your careful attention.
Meditation at its most basic is the art of tuning out of the frantic world of interpersonal communications and other distractions, and tuning into yourself. How your body feels. How you well you can hold a position or count those breaths or how meticulously you can fold that laundry or crochet that plant-holder.
Meditation is not about what you do. It’s about how you do it. Give something other than the crazy world and the maddening news your complete attention. Do something you are good at or something that feels good to you.
The principal I follow on meditative practice is that anything can be a meditation if you put your mind in the right place. I define “the right place” as a place where you are too busy holding a position, lifting weights, knitting a scarf, playing with your dog, washing your car, or doing something else that requires that you stay focused on being in the moment to get distracted by negative thoughts. Shutting down cellphones and devices helps!
Move.
You knew sex would have to show up in my advice, right? There is no natural high like orgasms. Stop taking drugs to get to sleep and focus on giving yourself as many orgasms as possible until you are too tired not to sleep.
Masturbate in the morning if you wake up stressed. Have an orgasm in the afternoon if you have a safe and private place to indulge. Make your nightly mantra, “Orgasms ease the pain of life” and go for it.
And if masturbation is just not for you, at least move your body around. Walk. Dance. Stretch. Hug yourself. Zoom into the physical side of your nature and let your brain pump out some endorphins to help you reconnect with that most fundamental of human attributes: HOPE.
