Part 2: When Things Fall Apart:
Hope As a Practice
Happy Independence Day. Can I even say that with what is happening in our country? Ever since the election, I made a pact with myself: I would approach the next four years differently than I did the first. No doomscrolling. No obsessive news refreshes. No riding the highs and lows of every breaking headline. I committed to staying informed but also committed to protecting my delicate nervous system.
For a while, I did pretty well. Until that disastrous bill hit the Senate floor, and all bets were off. Suddenly, I found myself up all night, endlessly scrolling through Instagram. I listened to The Daily and Ezra Klein, well, daily. I swiped at my NYT app like it was a nervous tick I couldn’t quit. With the passing days, I fell into a big black hole of numbness. However, the interesting thing is numbness prompted me into action. I called every senator. I combed through my contacts to find anyone in Republican districts whom I could encourage to call their representatives. I stalked Republican congresspeople on Instagram and left comment after comment: “VOTE NO ON BBB.” (Okay, not always that politely.) I’m proud of my involvement, even if it didn’t get us anywhere this time.
However, that action came with something else: A hidden pit of anxiety in my stomach, a tightness in my chest that I thought would unconsciously go away if I reached out to one more senator. When the bill was passed, I stood frozen in my kitchen and lost all sense of footing. As I sank to the floor, the only thing I could think was, “Those God Damn Assholes!”
Slowly, I peeled myself up off the floor and called our neighbor to see if she could watch my sick kid for an hour. I laced up my shoes and, with no real plan, found myself heading to my beloved Tilden Park. Even through the fog of numbness, a deeper part of me knew I needed to feel. For me, the best way to kick-start any journey back to myself always begins in nature.
I walked slowly, listening to the trees sway (if you’ve ever heard the Eucalyptus trees in the Bay area, the creaks feel as if the trees are about to yell “timber”); I noticed the disordered leaves all over the ground, the thick fog with the slivers of light poking through. I saw poison oak draped over the most beautiful wildflowers. And somewhere in the perfect mess, I began to feel.
But it wasn’t comfortable. It won’t be for quite some time. I felt anguish in my chest so big I thought I’d fall over. A barren blob in my belly that no amount of love could fill. I felt a petrified sliver in my throat. Grief, rage, devastation. A cocktail of torture, chaos, speechlessness, hopelessness, and inferiority. And through the feeling, the numbness was trying to claw its way back in.
But I felt it all. I survived it all. I’m still surviving.
So what now? I could curl up in a ball and pretend authoritarianism isn’t happening or 17 million people aren’t being knocked off their healthcare. Believe me, that ball of inaction is calling. But Krista Tippett says, “Despair lives so close to hope.” And coming out of the woods, I had a deep knowing that hope is always on the other side of Despair.
Now, I don’t mean hope as in wishful thinking, idealism, blind optimism, or a faith that everything happens for a reason. I mean Hope as a practice. A practice that tends to reality but dares to have an imagination that could create real-world consequences. Hope is for those who refuse to accept that things have to be this way. Some of our greatest heroes, such as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Malala, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, endured great hardship but always envisioned a better future. So, in the middle of the redwoods in Tilden, among my anguish, I realized that the only way through this is with love, deep connection, and imagination. As the great John Lewis said, “Love in Action.”
This isn’t the first time we have been through hard times, and it won’t be the last. But I know numbness is not the way through. Curiosity, hope, and imagination might just be. Through our despair, let us all become beacons of light through this darkness.
Because when everything falls apart, there’s a whole lot of room for something new to emerge.
Let’s hope together for the future we want to create,
Rachel