Rebecca Solnit
It feels apt to start the new year with a Thursday Thoughts about hope. As I rotate through Art, Life and Books as the themes for the quotes I ponder, the new year began with Life.
Rebecca Solnit is a fierce proponent of hope. In amongst everything that goes on, and everything we fear and everything we worry about, I often find her words make sense to me. The approach here I think emboldens me to hope, or somehow allows me to not be frozen by inaction.
Hope finds room for realisation exactly where you might think it wouldn't.
In uncertainty, in not knowing and in opacity.
Her thinking, which allows for this opacity and uncertainty to actually be defined as spaciousness, is a simple step, yet a breathtaking one.
She almost seems to say that not knowing how things will pan out is almost a prerequisite for hope; a precondition of sorts; some form of requirement.
Which is mighty relieving.
Perhaps the opposite of hope is that sense of feeling like you KNOW, you just KNOW, that things are going to end badly...
Within uncertainty lies hope, and the room to act, so without knowing where they might lead I shall keep doing small things, in small ways to help folk where and when I can, and to nudge the world (or at least my corner of the world) towards the sort of future I dream of (and hope for).
Hope, Macauley House, 2016.
