Accepting Hopelessness
Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.
I’ve been collecting quotes on hopelessness lately. It started with a devastating, beautiful article called SuperBabies Don’t Cry. That’s where I found the opening quote of this article.
Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. –Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart
I immediately added that quote to my collection. It stood out to me. It challenged me. In the context of the article, it didn’t feel like nihilism; it didn’t feel empty. It felt true. For the author, in her grief, it felt more true and more comforting than a thousand empty platitudes.
It’s one of those articles that will deepen how you think and how you feel and how you relate to the world. Go read it.
The next quote in my collection comes from Ezra Klein’s interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, about climate change and mass extinction. Heavy and important topics. At one point, Ezra asks Elizabeth about hope:
Ezra: Let me ask you, and you can tell me if you think this is a lazy question; you’re free to just reject it.
Elizabeth: Ok.
Ezra: What gives you hope here, if anything? Or is hope not a realistic emotion, given the underlying trends?
Elizabeth: Yeah. I will say that I think that there’s just too much talk about, you know, “are you hopeful? are you not hopeful now?” And I think that that is not the issue. And, you know, in both the book I wrote about climate change and the book I wrote about extinction, I almost try to make a joke out of that.
That’s not the issue. The question is not how we feel about it. That is — we all feel bad about it, we all wish it would go away. The question is, what are we going to do about it?
And here, the idea of hopelessness being a beginning starts to come more clearly into focus.
Sometimes hope is hard. Sometimes hopes are dashed. Sometimes hope feels foolish. Sometimes we must, as Jeffrey and Aaron so eloquently put it, seek to build morals on a foundation of ruined hopes.
I’m currently reading Understanding Power, a collection of conversations with Noam Chomsky. At the end of chapter four, someone asks him how social change takes place.
You keep plugging away—that’s the way social change takes place. That’s the way every social change in history has taken place: by a lot of people, who nobody ever heard of, doing work.
The questioner follows up by asking if Noam has ever gone through a phase of hopelessness. “Yeah,” says Noam, “every evening.”
Every evening. I mean, look: if you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what’s the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what’s the point?
First of all, those predictions don’t mean anything — they’re more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you’re guaranteeing that that’ll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget the pessimism.
So, then, is that it? Do I reject Killer Mike’s beautiful observation that you defeat the devil when you hold onto hope? Do we dissolve into hopelessness, despair, inaction?
God forbid. Hopelessness? Sometimes we can’t help it. Despair? Sometimes we must grieve. Inaction? God forbid.
Hope is a feeling. A feeling like infatuation or inspiration. Feelings come and go. And I’d say, like inspiration, hope is for amateurs.
I’m intrigued by the idea of accepting hopelessness. Maybe it’s ok to feel hopeless sometimes. Maybe accepting it, feeling the anguish of it, and refusing to give up anyway—maybe that becomes its own odd sort of hope. Not an ignorance-is-bliss, glass-half-full blitheness. But an eyes-open acceptance of hard truths, and then refusing to give up anyhow. The beginning of the beginning. An act of defiance. We can still defeat the devil.
Maybe by accepting this starting point of hopelessness, we can follow the instruction given in the intro of Tiny Beautiful Things:
Run toward the darkness, sweet peas, and shine.
