“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” - Rebecca Solnit, Hope In the Dark
I’ve had a tough relationship with “hope.” In the past it’s been my least favorite word because it felt sort of helpless to me. A state of being where what was being “hoped” for had not materialized. A sort of limbo space where I was waiting. Hope felt like inaction. Waiting, for me, is akin to suffering. Hoping = suffering. I couldn’t bear it. I needed something more. More tangible. More actionable.
The “hope” Rebecca Solnit speaks of in the quote above is the kind of hope I can get behind. The kind that moves you with so much purpose that you don’t give up, or quit having faith. What I always had was faith. Faith that there was a way out of the place we were in. Faith that my love was strong enough. Faith that I wouldn’t feel the way I was feeling forever. That it was possible to get well. To be ok. That recovery was possible.
I’m reclaiming HOPE as a force of love these days. Hope is the thread that tethers you to faith. Faith is sturdy, solid. When hope is lost, in the stories are where it’s found again. Hope is the motivation to take the action to change the way the story goes.
The Family Recovery Documentary, a force of love, a thread of hope.