This time last year, I was brimming with purpose and exhilarated by self-belief. A series of high-pitched motivational videos had seen me construct a series of goals, create habit trackers, and colour in a calendar with an elaborate rainbow of colours. Best of all, I conjured up my BHAGs – my Big Hairy Audacious Goals.
And then? As the year took is inevitable twists and turns, as life happened, I felt that sense of purpose slide away. Deadlines flew past. The BHAGs lay snoozing in their cave. It’s not that the planning was a waste of time. Perhaps without it, I would have got completely lost inside the year.
It’s just, I had become a fully paid-up subscriber to that adage: ‘a goal without a plan is just a wish.’ But sometimes there are places for wishes, in all their spaciousness.
This year, I am more interested in hope.
Last night, I dropped my friend, who is a Unitarian minister, home in a furious storm. As we sat in the car, waiting for a break in the rain, she told me about a practice she does at the start of each year. Her family write a list of things they’d like to do, and stick it on the fridge. Maybe they’ll do them. Maybe they won’t. But leaving the possibility in sight is something. The possibility that on some Saturday with nothing planned, you might find yourself at a rollerdisco, or making a cloud spotter, or signing up as a volunteer to help a child learn to read. Driving home, I thought of that her anti-resolution method worked like a gentle practice in hope.
Hope is quite different from resolve. ‘”Hope” is the thing with feathers’, as Emily Dickinson wrote. Hope is there when expectations run out, when the route is not clear, when we acknowledge how little control we have, when we are forced to let chance in. Hope sits in the middle of uncertainty, in the middle of chaos, and sings. In Hope In The Dark, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that hope is not the same as blind optimism: ‘it is not the belief that everything was, or will be fine…Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act’.
We are living in a moment where we find ourselves exhorted to hope. In the face of divisive politics, war and climate emergency, hope is something we urgently need, if we are to swim against the tide of despair and inertia. But what do we imagine hope to be? And how do we find it in ourselves?
Throughout history, hope has accrued many different meanings. Philosophers have argued about whether it is even good. While Aristotle linked hope to human agency and courage, Seneca warned against hope, believing it fuelled an anxious, restless, searching mind. For Christian theologians, hope was a rational virtue of their faith, and for Spinoza it was a form of pleasure. But for the 20th century Existentialists, to hope was to indulge in mere wishfulness and passivity. To hope was to defer the present to the future.
Hope has taken different forms across times and places too. Between the 11th and 16th centuries, Europe was swept by millenarian crazes, in which people fervently believed the world was soon to be destroyed in earthquakes, plagues and floods and a new dawn would come. In these fantasies, hope was understood as a sort of expectation - for deliverance, for a utopian future. In Germany in the 1530s, following the turmoil of the Reformation and the Peasants’ Revolt, a charismatic Dutchman Jan van Leiden led a group of radical Anabaptists to create a communitarian state in Münster, Westphilia. Their new state briefly delivered the hoped-for emancipation, a utopia of social harmony and shared property. It was, however, swiftly and brutally suppressed.
Striving and fantasizing about a perfectible future was part of the game I was playing with myself at the beginning of 2023. But as I look around me today, I see how our own moment of crisis offers us very different ways of thinking about hope. Solnit points out that Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, saw the mission as providing ‘hope and inspiration for collective action…rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams’. Here is a hope that is not directed towards deliverance, but exists, more tenderly, alongside sorrow and disappointment. As Solnit writes ‘You could call it [hope] an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings’.
Among climate activists in particular, hope is emerging as a critical emotion to understand if we want to combat the eco anxiety and climate despair around us. According to a post on the Greenpeace website, ‘believing doesn’t mean ignoring the devastation around us or shutting down feelings of sadness at what is lost or even anger at those responsible’, but it does mean keeping the possibilities in sight. Here, hope is not about imagining a naively perfect future, but working with what we have. Hope appears in glimpses, in ‘openings’, in opportunities where we see possibility. Even if all we can manage is keeping a list on our fridge.
I’m not saying I’m not making any plans. I’m about to get my highlighters out again (though I will leave the BHAGs behind). But more than plans, I need hope right now. I am working on a second draft of my book Bad Friend. This is the moment when I will be able to see if it has worked. It’s like the final baking, after all that mixing and kneading and proving and rising.
The hope I need sits at an awkward angle to talk of goals. Instead of trackable habits, I have to be comfortable sitting with uncertainty, relaxing in the middle of chaos without lurching into a panic. I have to allow myself to be in the in-between spaces, where anything might still happen.
Tiff x
Ps: Thank you so all of you who have subscribed over the last month! I am so happy to be here together. I am taking a short break from The Future Feeling while I work on my book draft. Wish me luck! I’ll see you again in February.
Pps: My friend also recommended the Year Compass. It’s free (you can donate if you find it helpful), and is a gentle way of reflecting on the past year and your hopes for the future. And instead of the relentless emphasis on self-optimisation, productivity and weight loss, it also invites you to reflect on how you might leave the world a better place than you found it. If you feel the need for new year reflection, I really recommend it.
Hope that sits ‘At an awkward angle to talk of goals’! Love this.