Hope is not a substitute for action, it’s a basis for action

I grew up deep in the rural areas of the former Ciskei, the youngest child of a trader whose isiXhosa name was “uZanethemba” or “Bringer of Hope”. Our shop was known as the “Good Hope Trading Store.” I honestly haven’t given much thought to this fact for more than 30 years, but lately it seems significant. A declaration, a prophesy even. Names are important in all cultures and in the Xhosa culture more than most. So I will claim for myself the right to be known as the youngest child of Hope. I plan to wear that name as a mantle. (Or a cape, maybe? I have always had a particular weakness for capes….)

I have been reading, thinking and asking ordinary people about their thoughts around hope for a long time. What is hope, and what does it mean and who has it and how do you get it? And is it even worth having, anyway or is it just a waste of time to entertain it? And this is what I have learned so far:
Put very simply, hope is the firm belief that things will be better in the future than they are now. Faith that the best is yet to come. I think maybe that the best form of hope believes that the future will be better in certain critical respects for everyone, and everything (People, animals, the planet. Not just materially better for me).

Astonishingly, a lot of very clever people (who could have made loads more money doing something more practical) have been studying hope for a long time. There are academics who have produced entire doctorates on hope. And there are a lot of things they know and some they don’t and the jury is still out on certain hope-related issues. But one thing is undisputed: Being hopeful is really splendid for your mental and physical wellbeing. It’s one of those game changers that will determine your capacity to survive and really thrive or even make it through an apocalypse. Sort of like being grateful, eating your greens, getting enough sleep, being able to forage efficiently and not being too seriously into substance abuse. Just better. In fact, hope is a critical part of that mindset that drives resilient behavior and is a crucial ingredient for producing the fabulous neurological pathways and Lego blocks necessary for creating vasbyt (resilience, resolve). (And we South Africans know better than most that without a decent dose of resilience we are all pretty much buggered.)

The other thing we know for sure is that hope is a primarily a choice, it is a skill/attribute that can be developed with tools and practice. Its not like you have it or you don’t, tough luck if it’s the latter. Cultivating hope is possible and it comes highly recommended if you aspire to healthy future. If you want a future at all in fact. Even if you aren’t usually much inclined toward that sort of airy fairy frivolity and are naturally more prone to hardcore cynicism – you should consider getting some hope if you want to stick around and stay in good shape physically and mentally.

Interestingly, hope has not so much to do with the reality of your actual circumstances and more to do with your response to them, your mindset and conscious choices. Particular people are able to articulate a robust sense of hope even in the face of personal tragedy, concentration camps, cancer wards, ghettos, debtor’s court and extended lock-downs. Their hope seems to be determined more by action, connection and a sense of purpose (real or even imagined) than by the situation in which they actually find themselves. From my own experience, from every person I have spoken to and every article I have read it seems that people who are hopeful say more or less the same thing: When we act, when we connect with other people in a meaningful way (especially those people who we are meant to fear/resent or who are supposedly responsible for making us doubtful of our hope in the first place) we are able to feel encouraged and optimistic despite (often dire) realities. (And the connection doesn’t have to be physical.) On the other hand, when we withdraw from other people in fear or distaste or rage, we feel the very opposite of hope. If we huddle with our worst fears and engage only with the people who share those fears, hope becomes an impossibility.

So when the obligatory negativity about the dismal future of South Africa begins around the (Zoom) braai or the boardroom table, I feel deeply compelled to interrupt the narrative with the words of Archbishop Williams. He articulates my own thoughts so perfectly when he explains: “I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic: I’m massively hopeful. You see an optimist says it’s all going to turn out right. A pessimist says it’s all going to turn out wrong. But a hopeful person says it’s possible we can make it better.”
And that is a place that I am excited to proceed from because I believe with all my heart that it is possible that we can make things better.

Being pessimistic or even optimistic is self-absorbed (things are going to be great/terrible for me). They are also fundamentally passive states of being. Being hopeful is the opposite. Hope is not passive. Hope is a doing word. Hope commands action.

To more fully comprehend hope, I have had to grasp what hope is not. I am grateful to Rebecca Solnit who helps me find this clarity: “…it (hope) is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. (Hope) is the belief that what we do matters …”
She goes on to say, “Its important to emphasise that hope is only a beginning. Hope is not a substitute for action, it’s a basis for action.”

Hope is a basis for action. Hope is not just wishing for a miracle to happen. It involves actively making things better while we wish. Making things better (for everyone and everything, not just for me) requires action and connection and it insists that I should get my hands dirty. It means expending effort and sacrifice. (Even some voluntary redistribution of tightly clutched resources.) Educating a child, teaching a skill, mentoring a youth, building a house, planting a garden, donating a piece of land, giving up significant amounts of your time or income or (comparative) wealth.
Doing stuff to make it better rather than just wishing for it or speaking about it or waiting for someone (politicians, big business, billionaires, someone whose better at being a responsible adult than me) to make it better.

I am coming to realize that the doing part of hope cannot be separated from giving. And giving cannot be separated from willing (even eager) sacrifice. I am feeling enormously challenged by this realization and have been for quite some time. I recently told a story (Fabulous South African Story #7) about “C”, who is a domestic worker employed in my village, to whom who I regularly give lifts:

“As C was getting out the car at the taxi rank she paused and went around to the back seat where Hannah was sitting. She kissed Hannah’s cheek through the open window, tipped all the coins out of her purse and pressed them into Hannah’s hand. “Imini mnandi kuwe, Ncebsi! Happy birthday to you Gracie!”(Hannah means Grace and her second name is Grace and her isiXhosa name means Grace. Grace is a thing in our family.) My every instinct was to refuse this gift on Hannah’s behalf but I stopped myself and watched their exchange in the rear view mirror with a lump in my throat.
I was unutterably moved. It felt almost biblical, the story of the widow tithing her last pennies in the temple (I do grasp the fact that Hannah isn’t a temple…). Her offering worth so much more than those of the loaded dudes who showed up next. The following day Hannah would be showered with gifts but none of them would come close to this in generosity. C literally gave my daughter everything she had. And (as is becoming usual) I was left feeling immensely humbled and challenged. To explain, to Hannah, the significance of what just happened. To become a better human because of C’s example.”

And so I wonder: To be of real value, shouldn’t giving (and therefor also hope) cost me something? Shouldn’t it involve a level of sacrifice? Even a great level of sacrifice? If giving leaves my life unaltered, precisely as comfortable as it was before, then am I even being generous? I’m not so sure. [Note to self: what am I giving up to enable someone else to have a better opportunity at success? How is my life-style changing? How am I (even fractionally) less comfortable than before through this act of giving?]

Can there be hope without action and without (sacrificial) giving? I don’t think so.

“Hope offers us clarity that, amid the uncertainty ahead, there will be conflicts worth joining and the possibility of winning some of them. And one of the things most dangerous to this hope is the lapse into believing that everything was fine before disaster struck, and that all we need to do is return to things as they were. Ordinary life before the pandemic was already a catastrophe of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality. It is too soon to know what will emerge from this emergency, but not too soon to start looking for chances to help decide it. It is, I believe, what many of us are preparing to do.” Rebecca Solnit (again).

Lets prepare then. Urgently. There are so many challenges facing us, both collectively and individually. And it’s particularly easy to become immobilized by the enormity of these challenges. Serious evil was allowed to take place in this country and on this planet and it has resulted in on-going hardship and pain for the majority of our people. And although we may not have even been alive when it all started we are nevertheless compelled to act (hopefully, calmly, sacrificially and intentionally) to do everything we can to stop that hardship and pain (which hasn’t gone away and isn’t going to unless we make it) from following us forever into the next generations. And we should acknowledge that this is difficult, and that we are often afraid and immobilized by the enormity of it all. But this shouldn’t stop us from doing hope (action + sacrifice) because we are a nation of people who epitomize creativity and vasbyt/nyamezela and that fabulous “boermaaknplan’ness” that we do so well. Eliminating the hardship and the pain is not something that can be done through government policy. It is not something “somebody should do something about”. It is my responsibility. And yours. We need to initiate this process ourselves and then participate wholeheartedly in it without swinging between idealism and bitter realism. And we should start by doing hope today where we are with what we’ve got. And we should be willing to sacrifice something. And we should do so as if our lives and our hope depend on it. Because they do.