By Harry Hutson
‘Hope’ is an impractical idea that turns out to be useful, especially in painful times like
these.
Hope is often misunderstood, underestimated, ignored and belittled, not least because
it has separate, seemingly contradictory modes. You want Hope to be there in moments
of despair when the best you can do is appeal for relief. And you want to be able to earn
Hope, to deserve it, to work for it. It is easy to be confused about the nature of Hope.
Understanding that Hope behaves in ways both mysterious and predictable is the secret to
unlocking Hope’s wisdom – wisdom available to anyone, wisdom useful every day.
Hope-in-despair resembles personal or collective grace. At the end of life, hope can
appear, unbidden, able to make meaning out of mortality. And during societal crises
marked by widespread anguish and discord, Hope can lead the way to solidarity and
healing. “In these moments of rupture, people find themselves members of a ‘we’ that
did not until then exist, at least not as an entity with agency and identity and potency”,
Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark.
Conscious, choice-filled Hope is another matter. When faced with hardship, you are free
to act in ways that garner Hope. When you do whatever you can to save the day, you
may discover you have enlisted Hope to bolster your energy and heighten your sense of
purpose. But in order for you to realize these benefits, you must act on your own behalf.
This essay explores Hope’s channels: active ones, where you make choices and receive
rewards, and wondrous ones, where autonomous forces seem to have intervened on your
behalf. My aim is to frame ways of thinking about Hope that have practical implications for
how you think and what you do.