“I am hope.”
With these simple words, the protagonist of Neil Gaiman’s iconic Sandman series, Dream, wins his epic battle against a powerful demon. He had journeyed to hell itself to reclaim one of the lost tools of his trade, but the battle had turned against him, with the demon transforming to match his every move, ultimately assuming a form of pure death and decay. Hope, we are told, conquers all.
This message repeats throughout the Western canon. After releasing all the evils of the world, Pandora discovers the one saving grace at the bottom of her box – hope. Most epic Hollywood movies feature a moment when all seems lost and a character must rally themselves and their comrades to an impossible hope that carries them through the darkness. Hope is central to the hero’s journey story arc that all those movies follow because it is essential to life, to thriving through the pain and chaos and destruction that repeatedly sweeps over us and the world.
It is a beautiful message, one that we all can and should remember more often as we navigate the struggles of our daily lives and the political and ecological threats facing the world. Otherwise, we sink into despair and the precious lifeforce we are gifted eludes us.
But, as we know, everything is paradox. Everything. Even hope, that force which saves us from the broken world, is not spared. Hope too contains seeds of harm.
Thich Nhat Hanh embraces this hard truth when he teaches that hopelessness is essential to fully living our lives. How could this be? Thay, as Thich Nhat Hanh is known by his students, is a Nobel peace prize nominee, a beloved teacher who has helped alleviate the suffering of countless people around the world, not some chain-smoking nihilist. How can he encourage us to follow a path that seems to lead straight to despair?
Another great wisdom teacher, T.S. Elliot, offers us an answer. In his poem, East Coker, he writes:
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope/For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”
There it is—hope for the wrong thing. Hope, in its specificity, is a form of violence against the present and the future. If I hope for a certain candidate to win an election, I am likely to reject the life that will still be there if they lose, the seeds of beauty and growth that are contained in even the most seemingly negative outcomes. Even when I hope for the end of a terrible darkness—a disease or war—I am turning away from the present, from the gifts of life I have right now, faint as they may be. When I am hoping, I am captured by a desire for things to be different.
And hope, Elliot tells us, is always specific. We hope for our lives, our country, our world to be a certain way. Through hope, we seek to impose our vision, our will, upon the world. As beautiful and generous as our vision may be, we are seeking to control life rather than accepting whatever the world offers us. That is why Elliot urges us to not just hope for the right things, but to wait without hope entirely.
In this way, the fruit of hopelessness is not despair, but the deep happiness and peace that is born of acceptance. If I can let go of my need for my life to be different, I can love it exactly as it is now, exactly as it unfolds over all of my remaining days. That is the hard, beautiful lesson Thay and Elliot are trying to teach us.
And yet we must not abandon hope. All those stories are right—we need hope to live. We will always dream for the world to be different, better. How’s that for a knife’s edge? We need to cultivate both hope and hopelessness within us at the same time. In a life full of confounding paradoxes, this is surely one of the hardest and most important to hold.
Meaning is All
This would be a fiendishly hard paradox to grasp during even our best days. But, as Elliot emphasizes, we need it most when all else fails us, when we are caught in the “movement of darkness on darkness.” How can we possibly manage that? How can we find not only hope but also hopelessness when we feel our entire world is falling apart?
Victor Frankl offers us a powerful answer: meaning. Trapped in the deepest darkness imaginable—the horror of a concentration camp—he found this paradox within him. He both held to a specific hope that he would survive, return to his life and complete his research that he felt would help people in pain. And he held a hopeless acceptance that the immense suffering within and around him itself had meaning, a meaning he could not see or comprehend in the darkness.
That, too, is Elliot’s answer. After telling us we must wait without hope and thought and even love, he gifts us this: “there is yet faith.” That is a loaded, scary term for those immersed within a secular, rationalist culture. But, in essence, it is no different than Frankl’s meaning—a trust that there is a purpose to our experience and actions. The centrality of meaning to human life is something that all but the most diehard nihilists share.
Fortunately, few of us will ever face anything like Frankl’s trials. But darkness will descend on our lives again and again and again. It may come in the form of a company in crisis, a struggling child, a health scare, or a fractured relationship. It may even be the loss of meaning itself, the groundless reordering of midlife or the yawning abyss of depression. When it does, finding and holding a specific hope can be hard but often comes naturally. It is the hopelessness, the acceptance and embrace of deeper meaning, that is hardest for most of us.
If Frankl can find that blend of hope and acceptance in a concentration camp and Thay can find it in the brutality of the Vietnam war, surely we all have the capacity to find it within our own struggles. But, for most of us, tapping into that capacity is a hard art that we must nurture and develop. It is an art that our materialist, status-obsessed culture fears and loathes (I doubt we will see the Pixar movie “Hopeless” any time soon).
We can practice that art every day, train on the clouds that regularly gather over the little moments of our lives in preparation for the thunderstorms that will eventually arrive. Take parenting, for example. We hope for our child to improve in school or sports, to become caring, responsible adults. But we also know that, in the end, our love must be unconditional, that we must allow them to be who they are, not who we wish they would be. Parenting means waiting, hopeless, for our children to unfold as they are meant to be even while we pour our hopes into the after-school activities and family trips and stern reprimands.
Embracing Ignorance
Ultimately, we need to apply the art of hopelessness to war and climate change and massive political shifts. It is possible to open the morning paper and see the paradox, the seeds of renewal, buried even within the headlines that most horrify us. This is not Candide’s blithe optimism that those horrors are “all for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” No, we need to weep and rage and grieve at the brutality of the world. We need to know that people may continue to suffer and die, that renewal may not come for many years, that our body or relationship may never be the same after this crisis. We need to know that our specific hopes may never come to be.
But we also need to know that from all this pain and confusion and loss, something beautiful will grow, possibly something more beautiful than we could ever imagine through our specific hopes. This is an excruciatingly hard perspective to hold. But we need this perspective now more than ever as this age of turmoil and transformation unfolds around us.
How do we cultivate that perspective when the brutality and terrors of the world seem relentless? We let go of our endless hunger for certainty and control and try to rest in a place of uncertainty and unknowing. That practice is perhaps best captured by the classic Taoist story of the Farmer’s Luck:
There was an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "Such bad luck," they said sympathetically.
"Maybe," the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed.
"Maybe," replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.
"Maybe," answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.
"Maybe," said the farmer.
Who are we to know the good a seemingly terrible events will birth? Who are we to know the harm a seemingly great event will spawn? Holding the paradox of hope and hopelessness means calmly embracing the reality of our powerlessness. It means reading the news and responding to the despair or delight rising within us at some headline with the farmer’s eternal truth: maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe…there is yet faith. That is the power of the middle way.
Beautiful as usual. What a paradox.