Hope is a Discipline

This past Saturday, I was walking home with my husband and daughter, carrying well-used protest signs and feeling buoyant. We, like millions of others around the world, marched that day in protest of the Trump administration (among other things), and had spent the afternoon chanting “This is what democracy looks like!” with thousands of others in Portland.

On the walk back home, we passed by a neighbor who hadn’t been at the protests. He saw our signs and wryly asked, “Did you fix it? Is it all better now?”

It was a cynical joke.

Underneath it, I could hear his real sentiments: Your silly little activism doesn’t do anything. We don’t have any real power. Nothing is going to change anyway, so why even try.

I know that a lot of people feel this way. It’s easy to feel hopeless. We believe, perhaps rightly, the powers-that-be don’t care about us. Even those of us who do go out and try to make an impact may feel crestfallen when our efforts don’t result in big, overnight changes.

And let’s be honest: mostly likely, they won’t.

We often feel the same way about our personal lives. We want one-and-done solutions and instant results. When we don’t get it, we tell ourselves that nothing will ever change.

That we will never change.

The sign I made and carried at the protest on Saturday read “Hope is a discipline.”

This quote comes from Black activist Mariame Kaba, and it reflects my belief that hope is not a feeling you have when things happen to be working out well—it is a choice you make, over and over, regardless of the obstacles in front you.

Treating hope as a discipline means committing to taking embodied action (my theme for this year), in small, repeated ways, toward the world you want to see.

It is listening to the wisest, most grown-up parts of ourselves, who know that big changes take time and persistent effort and that the world is nuanced and complex, holding many truths at once.

Practicing hope is understanding that while cynicism, apathy, and despair may feel “good”—or at least, not stupid—in the moment, that we ultimately won’t be satisfied with them in the long run.

We know that, as humans, we long to care, to be connected, to be deeply alive.

So, let us honor the grief we feel, and then honor our longing for a more balanced, just, and beautiful world. Let us pick ourselves up and continue to dream, to hope, to try anyway.

Let us deliberately, stubbornly, choose hope.

(Check out my recorded class, “Choosing Hope”, for more on practicing the discipline of hope.)