Does renewable hope mean giving up? Oh yes, maybe it does!
Maintaining a life of sustainable hope and optimism requires a few core and difficult skills:
Letting go of outcomes: Reckoning with the reality that we will never be certain that our efforts are fruitful. Practicing uncertainty and doing it anyway.
Half-heartedness/Seasonality/Variation: A sustainable life meanders at a pace that is long and slow and steady. This means doing a bit of work regularly then resting. This means practicing seasons of growth and production, and seasons of slumber and recharge.
Below are a few of the quotations that inspire me to do hard work in the world where I don’t know if I will ever make a difference but I still want to get up each morning and do it anyway.
This poem appeared on our refrigerator this morning from a treasured teacher poet:
Let Them Not Say
1953 –
Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.
Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.
Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.
Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.
Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.
Let them say, as they must say something:
A kerosene beauty.
It burned.
Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.
—2014
Copyright © 2017 by Jane Hirshfield. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 20, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
From the amazing Jenny Odell:
Everything we had now that was beautiful had been struggled for, just as much of what you have that is beautiful is what we will need to struggle for. Ages of wisdom have hung in the balance before and could hang there again. Zoom far enough into any moment of the past and all you will find is contingency and doubt.
This is, after all, what you and I have in common: we each live in a present, a space for action. I no longer see you as an arrival point, far away from us on a line, or over the side of a waterfall. You, the future, are always imminent in my undecided present. We are at the center of time, and you, reading this, are also there. In both of our moments, we have so much to lose, but also so much to gain.
- Jenny Odell from Dear future, here’s the one lesson I want to pass on to you (author of Saving Time and How To Do Nothing)
Desmond Tutu making the wildly elevating stand he would rather go to hell than a homophobic heaven:
"I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place," Archbishop Tutu said at the launch of the Free and Equal campaign in Cape Town.
"I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this."
These lyrics will be on the cake at my funeral:
And if I spend my life on the losing side
You can lay me down knowing that I tried
There's a better world and on a quiet day
When I hold my breath I can hear her say
She's on her way
She's on her way
Thank you Grace Petrie.
Love, Kerry
This post brought to you by Kerry Makin-Byrd, PhD, author and clinical psychologist. Subscribe here for her weekly newsletter.
