Contribution by Anja
‘Everywhere I looked, hope existed – but only as some kind of green shoot in the midst of struggle. (…) Hope, I began to realise, was not a state of life. It was at best a gift of life.’
Sr Joan Chittister
Hope as a quality is ephemeral, and at the same time it can profoundly impact how we experience our lives. To have lost all hope means to be in the pit of despair. On the other hand, what does it mean to have hope? We can have all the hope in the world that everything will turn out okay, yet we know this is not how life works. Things go wrong all the time, and none of us are immune from accidents, illness or other calamities.
Zen teacher and writer Joan Halifax talks about ‘wise hope’, by which she means finding value in our efforts to make the world a better place, even as we understand there is no guarantee what we’re working towards will succeed. She was writing in the context of her work with the dying, in prisons, and for social justice causes. All of these require her to remain
engaged and give a lot of herself, yet may show little in the way of ‘outcomes’. The opposite of ‘wise hope’ may not be despair but apathy, a pervasive sense of ‘why bother?’ The problems are so numerous and overwhelming, what difference can one person really make?
In the light of the current bushfire emergency, we may feel quite powerless, yet on the other hand, a vast number of people are doing their best to somehow help out, whether it’s fighting fires, donating money, or sowing pouches and bandages for injured wildlife.
Whenever doctors need to give a prognosis, they are navigating this difficult terrain between hope and disempowerment. It would be unethical for a doctor to tell a patient ‘don’t worry, you will be just fine’ when the patient probably has only a few months to live. On the other hand, a doctor’s words can be very powerful, and they need to somehow convey the
reality of the situation without inadvertently taking away the patient’s will to live. A prognosis is only a statistical average, not a foolproof prediction, but can potentially be internalised by the patient as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether we have hope or feel resigned will profoundly influence our life, but we cannot have hope at the expense of denying reality
either. If, as Sr Joan Chittister said, hope is a ‘gift of life’, then what are the conditions which can allow the ‘green shoot’ of hope to flourish in the midst of our sometimes difficult reality?
When life is very tough, we can become vulnerable to the pedlars of false hope who promise us miracle cures or ever-lasting salvation or immunity from suffering. We long for a way to control life rather than being swept up in its vagaries. Yet this doesn’t mean we should just be resigned either, or never look outside conventional understandings for innovative solutions.
Some of the core attributes of mindfulness, such as acceptance, beginner’s mind, non judgement and trust, can be helpful qualities to explore in relation to hope. Hope can be complex, nuanced, and difficult to describe. It’s not something we can obtain and then possess, we may not even be able to describe what hope feels like, but we do feel its absence keenly. One of my favourite quotes about hope comes from Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and dissident, written during the Russian occupation of his country:
‘I just carry hope in my heart. Hope is not a feeling of certainty, that all ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have meaning.’
Reflective practice:
Set aside some time, such as ten or twenty minutes, and either through journaling or during meditation, keep asking yourself the question – ‘for me, hope means…’ What emerges for you as you keep sitting with this question? Does anything unexpected arise for you?
Anja Tanhane