SIGNS OF HOPE

"IT'S ALL ROCK AND ROLL TO ME"

 

 I once knew a girl named Hope. She was a shy little thing. My mom would have called her “plain.” That was before the age of enlightenment. Now with sharper human compassion, we look beyond the surfaces of people to find other attributes. But I never found much in Hope — no hidden talent, no outsized passions, no righteous empathy. She was always waiting for somebody to tell her what to do next — a profoundly sad way to go through life.

Hope’s parents were older — into their forties — when she was born. I didn’t know much about them except that they were scientists and quietly reserved in that Old World proper kind of way.  Did they expect this baby to change their social status or their politics or their own personalities? Maybe they invested all their dreams, yearnings, expectations into this tiny person. Hope’s thin little shoulders simply could not bear that much weight.

When Hope was about 15 years old, her parents divorced.  I never heard why. One parent remarried; the other did not. Both parents were in their early 70s when they died — an age that seems young to me now. I lost track of Hope — where she lives, if she married, became a mother herself. None of those facts. Nor do I know if she ever woke up and became assertive or at least, self confident. Probably not.

America is in the middle of a cyclone right now fed by vile politics and bad health with economic insecurity piling on. The Age of American Arrogance ended. Some of us don’t know where to turn. Peace is what we most want. When the world is deconstructing, where is the Gorilla Glue?  

I’m  a big fan of Rebecca Solnit and I listen to Elizabeth Gilbert and I read Heather Cox Richardson most mornings. Women might save us. In her book HOPE IN THE DARK, Solnit writes “Hope is an embrace of the unknown…a sense of radical uncertainty.”

 (She wrote a lot about radical change even before the COVID 19 virus slammed us out of our stupor. )

Elizabeth Gilbert, in a TED conversation said “Resilience is our shared genetic inheritance.” She told stories of people who found themselves in extraordinary situations — floods, earthquakes, accidents — and reports that they nearly all said the same thing: in the middle of crisis, suddenly they felt calm and intuition took over.

Resilience. It’s what separates us from other animals. Not the opposable thumbs we all learned about in 8th grade. Not even the size of our brains, as it turns out! It is resilience ( and our ability to work together in groups.)  

“In disasters, most people are altruistic, brave, generous,” a point of view echoed by Rutger Bregman in HUMANKIND: A HOPEFUL HISTORY. My daughter just gave me this book. I’m only on page 10.  When I finish reading it, I’ll pass it on because ultimately that’s the most powerful thing I can do — read, think, write, hold on to hope.

Would I ever name a daughter Hope? Never! Just having a daughter — just being somebody’s daughter! — is hard enough.