Hope is what you feel the first time you share your biggest regret with a friend, your vulnerability pounding in the heart like a galloping mad horse. You are hopeful that you will be understood. Hopeful that your mistake will not be held against you. Hopeful, in some sense, that exposing yourself will pave the way for your own forgiveness and lay the basis for your growth.
Rare event of life blooming in Death Valley
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3476077/Rare-Death-Valley-super-bloom-carpets-desert-color.html
The reason why hope is so hard is because there are no guarantees. No predictions of the outcome. No foresight of what will come. Just like you can’t create a non-disclosure agreement before revealing a secret, you just can’t know if things will play out well in advance. And so you just hope they do.
These days hope seems hard to find. If you go on any news website, it will have up on some corner a bleeding map of planet earth. Maps indicating rising temperatures, maps locating endangered zones and pictures reporting the disastrous effects of war. The narrative of hope is rare while the one of doom and destruction is all too present.
I believe not only that there is hope for this planet of ours, but also that hope is precisely what will enable us to construct our better future. Hope operates at the interface with the unknown: if we enter the new age of the Anthropocene, one in which humans, as the all inclusive biological species, have the power to impact and modify the Earth and its biodiversity in an unprecedented way, there needs to be an underlying force that triggers environmental conscience.
Just like in the past, hope emerges from unexpected situations. With the pairing of hope with work, I think the Anthropocene doesn’t have to be a dooming era. And just as Rebbeca Solnit notes, “this is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen” (32). Hope makes us eager to experience this unforeseen.
Solnit, Rebecca. “Grounds For Hope.” Tikkun, Duke University Press, 2 Feb. 2017, muse.jhu.edu/article/647432/pdf
