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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. (Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams)
Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. Hopeful people are actively engaged in defying or changing the odds. (ecologist David Orr)
Maybe hope isn’t what we need
From “Beyond Hope” by Derrick Jensen:
The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line. …
When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they — those in power — cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself.
And “An Alternative to Hope” by Emily Nagoski:
What’s it called, when you have no reason to believe a wanted future may come to pass and yet you continue to work toward it just as if you did believe you could make a difference? What’s the name for that emotion, when you walk toward the world you want, knowing that each next step might be off a cliff?
Adrienne Martin calls it faith.
And look, I’m an atheist. Yet I walk with faith because I know what my job is here on Earth, and I’m going to do my job even though I have good reason to believe I will never see the world I am working to create. My faith is not in any supernatural critter, but in the arc of history bending toward justice as long as all of us keep pressing it toward justice.
See also: hopeless and fearless