2015 was a pretty crap year for the world. Terrorist attacks, unhinged migration, atrocious persecution of people groups, alarming climate-change forecasts, wars upon wars in the Middle East, Donald Trump….
Fortunately, 2015 was not nearly as mean to me, but it did give me cause to shed (quite a few) more tears than usual. There was pain, disappointment, confusion, constraint, elation, apprehension, optimism, gratefulness, amazement. One of my very favorite lines of poetry was written by Ghalib, a Turkish-Indian poet from the 19th century: “All my self-possession is self-delusion; what violent effort to maintain this nonchalance!” I totally get what he means. Historically I’ve preferred to deny the fact that I’m a very emotional person, but I’m in my thirties now. I just don’t have that kind of energy anymore. So I felt my way through all of it.
Upon reflection, I think I can condense my entire emotional journey from this past year into one word: hope.
Hope is a tricky concept. It’s framed as a positive thing, but in my experience, hope inherently implies being stuck in a holding pattern. It implies discontent. It implies restlessness. One of the biggest problems I have with hope is that it hurts. It keeps me impatient. And it keeps me vulnerable. The line separating hope from disappointment is a very fine one. The harder I hold on to the former, the more I risk experiencing the latter. This is not a comfortable place to be in.
Hope is paradoxical. It is pain, risk, uncertainty. It is also the expectation of something better, which in turn produces joy. Great joy. Exuberantly great joy. In the middle of a shit storm, hope is what keeps me going more than anything else. It’s this expectation of something better that gets me to the other side. Just as great reward necessitates great risk, great expectation necessitates great hope.
Let hope be the defining word for 2016.
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