hitting refresh on hope

the dangers of platitude

Jan 19, 2023

Thanks for being here, reading the first edition of The Murmuration!

Each week I’ll be taking a sideways look at the ideas, people and stories shaping our culture and lives today. My ambition is to spotlight themes not commonly covered in the media, or to look at stories reported extensively from a different angle.

A note on the name: Starlings form murmurations because there is safety in numbers, but also because they provide a space to keep warm at night and exchange information with each other. This is a place where you can bring your own ideas, worries, hunches and opinions. Please share your thoughts - I’d love to hear them.

A couple of weeks ago I was in a car returning from Derbyshire with my partner and two extra passengers, friends who needed a lift to the train station. From the front seat my friend Harry took out his phone and started reciting Susie Dent’s words for 2023. His favourite words from this list included confelicity: taking joy in another person’s happiness, feckful: to be powerful, efficient and rigourous, and respair: a verb and noun meaning fresh hope, a recovery from despair.

Respair is a good word, we agreed. It felt like a word that should be used a bit more often. At home I unpacked the festive paraphernalia from our trip (a pork pie, somehow untouched?) and tried to find out a bit more about the term. It turns out that respair has never been in regular use in the English language. In fact, the OED only includes one reference to it, in 1425. Clearly respair deserves a revival.

But first let’s take a moment to think about its bedfellow, hope, defined as a feeling of expectation and a desire for a particular thing to happen. If you’re anything like me then hope is a word you’ve come to use casually, without much intent: ‘I hope you feel better next week’, I might say to a friend with a cold. Even worse: ‘I hope this email finds you well.’ What do I mean by that? Nothing much, really. It’s a benign platitude, just something we say.

But the Czech statesman and playwright Václav Havel points out that hope is:

an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart … Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good … The more unpromising the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is.

We appear to be shying away from this stronger definition of hope, one that is intrinsically connected to difficult situations that appear ‘unpromising’. And this strikes me as strange, because we are living through a time of polycrisis, in which multiple unprecedented and adverse sociopolitical events are converging simultaneously. Unlike previous generations, we are exposed to news of these crises on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. In this context, the hope we need is the deep form of hope that Havel refers to, rather than the shallow form of hope we appear to have adopted. Shallow hope is not enough to get us through this moment because it does not ask enough of us. It does not require us to ‘work’ towards the good. Deep hope is a posture of the heart that leads to action rather than a trite platitude.

So what stops us from embracing it?

After the pandemic I think many of us where preparing for a moment of collective exhalation that never came. We’d seen how things can be different—how the planes stopped flying and nurses were hailed as heroes, and dared to hope that this was an opportunity for our institutions and political norms to be subverted for the better. But for many reasons, this longed for cathartic, watershed moment never manifested, and we still find ourselves holding our breath. ‘Hopefully 2023 will be better’ we surmise, knowing full well that the political outlook looks far from it.

And so we live in a culture where hope is located in inboxes, but not in the mouths of our politicians. It is simultaneously cheap to obtain and unimaginable to behold. To live in this reality is to experience a type of cognitive dissonance which fails to acknowledge and absorb how difficult things have been and continue to be. After successive traumas, we’ve needed to distance ourselves from hope in order to protect ourselves from yet another crushing disappointment.

Those of you who live with or experience depression probably know first hand what it means to lose hope completely; to be in the place of despair. You probably also instinctively understand what respair feels like, because to recover from depression is to experience respair in its fullest sense. It is to go from a place of complete nihilism, where you feel that nothing good will happen again, to a place of trust, trust that this anguished state is a temporary one. It brings me comfort to know that our ancestors also needed a word like this. We are not the first people to have lost sight of the spiritual tools we need to live.

The existence of a word like respair adds to our multilayered understanding of what hope looks like in the first place. If hope is something that we can return to anew, and rediscover after periods of despair, then hope is grittier and more robust than we give it credit for. In other words, we can trust it. We can trust that our hope is bigger than our fears, because when we are ready to seek it out, hope will be there, ready and waiting.

This moment in history provides an opportunity to put both respair and hope into action: to trust daringly that the future can look different. To rediscover the possibilities that deep and active hope invite us to imagine. These are not easy undertakings, and are not ways to simply outsource or externalise our anxieties. Both are an ‘inside job’ reliant on our ability to recover a sense of agency and autonomy that is embattled on all fronts. The climate writer Joanna Macy puts it like this:

Active hope is not waiting to be rescued by the lone ranger or some saviour …Active hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act … none of these can be discovered in an armchair or without risk.

For Joanna, hope is not passive. It is not platitudinous. It is about making a choice to be an active participant in the future of this world.

As we enter a new year may you come to embrace respair, and look anew at the hope which invites us to recommit ourselves: to each other, to our communities, and to this earth that we call home.

BOOK CORNER:

Consider these three books your hope starter pack. Joanna’s Active Hope is excellent on the relationship between climate change and hope, whilst The Lost Words is a beautifully illustrated reminder of why words and their usage matters. Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark is now almost twenty years old but has become an important thematic introduction to the subject. (n.b If you purchase through these affiliate links I receive a small commission from bookshop.org)

Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit
The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris

THREE WISE PEOPLE:

We’ve just celebrated epiphany, so it feels appropriate to share the work of three people who bring their unique gifts and perspectives with the world.

Anyone obsessed with The White Lotus (hello there) will enjoy reading this thoughtful essay: The Portrait of the Artist as a young Hawk by actor and director Will Sharpe, who plays Ethan.
I’m thinking a lot about interiors at the moment, and found this apartment tour by modern-day renaissance man Rajiv Surendra a nice change from the heavily prop-styled homes featured in Architectural Digest. Who knew you could do that with chalk?
Continuing our theme of renaissance artists, the multi-talented musician, rapper and actor Little Simz speaks of the importance of integrity and freedom in her new album NO THANK YOU. Her track Angel is worth a listen.

Take care,

Grace