Hope

Hope cannot be fickle. It cannot be bound to the instability of temporality - good fortune one day does not promise good fortune the next. If our hope is contingent on wishing progress were linear or predictable, our hope will be beaten down by life until it feels trite and naive to imagine a better world.

For hope to survive it cannot be tied to outcomes, it must grow organically from the process of hope itself. That is, hope is self actualizing - we can hold onto it, live in it, thrive in it, when we recognize it as a way of living rather than something to achieve. We don’t retain hope because of the promise that things will get better, we retain hope because things can get better and no set backs big or small can take that away from us.

The election on November 3rd looms large for many. The US presidency impacts not just those living within the US, but all those across the world affected by US policy and practice.

This election in particular feels existentially significant on a scale unlike others before. And yet, this is a lie. This election is important but so was the last one and the one before that and all others before that. Climate change is no more a threat than it was 4 years ago - it is as existentially urgent as it was a decade ago, it’s just harder to ignore now. Tyranny and injustice and oppression are no more urgent matters than they were 20 years ago, it’s just harder to pretend these things are not bound to the systems that define our world. The fight for liberation and sustainability and equity is not one that is unique to this election, it’s just more apparent than before what happens if we fail.

Yet failure and victory are not things we can claim as singular events. Whatever lays ahead, our world will not get better because Biden wins on November 3rd nor will it be doomed if Trump wins. What happens next is up to us. It’s up to our creativity, our resilience, our commitment to act and organize and strategize and come together to make material the world we know we deserve and the world we know can exist.

Our hope cannot be contingent upon the election results this Tuesday evening because even if things go the way we want, the work of building a better world will still fall on our shoulders, as it always has. True, that work would be easier should Biden win, but it is still work that must be done, and it is work that does not become impossible regardless of Tuesday’s outcome.

Still, the prospect of a Trump victory is demoralizing nonetheless and it would be willfully obtuse to pretend that there is no reason to be stressed or anxious as we await the future. For at this point, that is all we can do. Those of us able to vote will have already vote or will vote on Tuesday. We will do our best to support others who wish to vote for Biden. But mostly, the next 108 or so hours will be spent living our lives, part of our psyche unabatedly reserved for the anxiety, trepidation, and hope that Tuesday’s election brings.

In the spirit of solidarity and of shared community, I will be blogging ever day through the election and the days that follow sharing art and quotes and thoughts that foster resilience and hope in me. The comments section will be open and I encourage anyone reading this to share their own sources of hope and resilience, the things that remind you what a powerfully loving beautiful place the world can be, the things that give you hope that things can always get better than they are, no matter how dark and miserable life can be.

We’re not powerless in this, but nor are we infinitely powerful. And that’s as it should be. Concentrated power is what brings injustice and tyranny and oppression to the world. Shared collective power and community and trust are what brings joy and hope and life into existence, both literally and figuratively, from the collective complex wondrous inner workings of our bodies - trillions of components all working together to allow us to experience being alive - to the ecosystems to which we belong to our planetary systems and the universe as a whole. It’s our connections and our bonds, big and small, that make life what it is and that allow things to be better.

So the next week is not remarkable in the span of all of history - it is a single event when life and hope and politics are made up of millions events which collectively determine the course of things to come. But it is a remarkable event at this point in time, at this point in our lives, at this point in our emotional trajectory, at this point in a global pandemic.

We’ll move forward together because it is the only way forward, whatever the outcome.

And in the meantime, we can ground ourselves in the things that remind us that our lives, our hope, does not exist on a scale defined by hours or days or weeks. We’re not in this so that next Thursday life can feel less bleak, we’re in this for each other, for the world, for the long haul, so that over the course of our lives, the world can become a better more just more equitable more loving place to be than it was when we came into it. Nothing can take that hope, that possibility, away from us, so that is what I’m going to focus on over the next 100 or so hours as the back of my brain spins itself in circles with anxiety and fear.

I can’t control the part of me that worries over what’s ahead, but I can choose to focus on community and connection and remind my nervous system that hopelessness is not now, nor ever war, an option.