117: How to Hope

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Speaker 1: In a world where we other, other people, where we build walls, you just tear down walls. Fuck finding it or falling into it.

Speaker 2: Our future depends on making it. Hey there, my friends. Happy New Year. I hope each of you is well. I'm coming back online after a little break. There was a birth in my family and a death in my family and all of that necessitated some time away. So thank you for your patience and the gap between episodes. I really appreciate your being here and I want to talk about hope today, primarily because I spent a lot of time talking about how to be hopeless on this podcast, like how to despair. We had an episode on that, how to feel alone. And as I said before, in several previous episodes, I've mentioned this in different interviews and different conversations, but there was a time in my life where I gave up on hope. I sort of broke up with hope. And I want to talk about that a little bit more.

Speaker 2: Today's conversation is about how to generate hope, especially when you have no logical reason to or when you don't really feel like it. But this is also an episode for the natural hopers among you. So here's some context. As I mentioned, for a while in my life, I gave up on hope. And it is true that during that time, my depression was pretty active, but that is not the reason that I let go of hope. I let go of hope because I noticed that I was holding it like an expectation, like something I should have. And because I didn't have hope, I was looking at the world and being like, "Fuck this. " It felt like something was wrong with me because other people around me did have hope. I feel like I was sort of letting hope dom me without my permission. And it was becoming this sort of demand, like this moral requirement that I was judging myself arbitrarily against, that I felt like I should have the saying I didn't have it.

Speaker 2: And I didn't like, not that I didn't have it, but I didn't like how I was orienting around it and how I was feeling around it. And so I let go of hope. And while that sounds maybe a little sad or depressing, it actually felt really liberating to me at the time. When I let go of hope, it just felt freer. I felt more calm. It felt more honest. So if you're someone who doesn't feel hope, I want you to know, totally respect that. For some people, I think hope truly is optional and for others, it's absolutely essential. So whether you're a hope half empty or hope half full kind of pal, got you covered today, you're in the right place because I noticed something strange kept happening even after I had abandoned hope, even when I didn't believe things would improve, even when I could rationationalize doom very, very convincingly, sort of like I can right now in the state of the world, something in me kept moving toward hope or some flavor of it.

Speaker 2: And I'm interested in the what and the why of that. And that's what this episode is about. So grab a comfy seat, ideally with a fluffy animal and let's have some provocative conversation about how to hope.

Speaker 2: Most of what we call hope is actually belief. Belief that things will work out or suffering has a reason or effort will be rewarded or that the story has to make sense or has to be fair somehow or that good will triumph over evil or that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. None of those things are foolish to believe, but they're beliefs. And if hope is a belief, then we're in a tricky spot because it asks for evidence to support it. So what happens for a lot of us is that when the evidence for those beliefs starts to collapse, our hope can sometimes collapse alongside it. So if you've lost hope because you're paying attention to the state of the world, you are not broken. It makes sense that hope might be dwindling for you because each day we get more and more and more evidence that humans are pretty awful and that the state of the world is largely bleak.

Speaker 2: But here's the thing, if hope were only a belief, it wouldn't survive hopeless conditions, and yet it does. This is the core idea of this episode. And I want to say it really clearly. Hope, I don't think ... It's not this thought about the future. Hope is a sensation in the present. It is a commitment we make in the present. It is a capacity we have in the present moment. It's not optimism. It's not confidence. It's not certainty. Hope is an orientation. It's a direction that your nervous system takes. Even when your mind says, "Nope, fuck that. " If hope were belief, it would be optional, but hope keeps happening even to people who don't want it to, like me. So let's get specific. I think we've got some BS stuff around hope baked into our culture. Not that it's wrong, just that it's not fully truthful or fully honest.

Speaker 2: I personally don't think that hope usually feels like excitement or positivity or motivation or clarity. I think those are sometimes like downstream effects of hope, but I don't think they're hope itself. I think hope actually tends to feel like either like a slight forward lean or this like nagging part of you that refuses to sort of fully shut down or hurts when you do or irritation sometimes that something still really matters deeply to you or sort of like care for someone or something or a situation. I found that hope is largely pretty inconvenient. It can show up as, "I don't want to care anymore, but I do. " Or it can show up like in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, there is something that still compels me forward. That sensation that something's still nagging me here, something's still pulling me here. That's hope or at least a form of it.

Speaker 2: So if hope isn't a belief, but it's an orientation, how do we work with that? How do we point ourselves in that direction on purpose, especially when we're lost or burned out or despairing or when we just really, really fucking need it. I want to be clear about what we're doing from here on out in this episode. I'm talking about two kinds of hope. There's intellectual hope, which is belief based and I'm not dismissing that sort of hope. I just think it's not quite as helpful as the other sort of hope, but intellectual hope is belief based and it asks, "Do I have a reason to think this will turn out okay?" And I think a lot of us live there and it holds hands with fear. There's also this sort of vital hope for a lack of better phrase and it is capacity based.

Speaker 2: It asks not, "Do you have a reason to think this is going to turn out okay?" But instead it asks, "How do I stay oriented toward life even when I don't want to or even when I don't believe anything or even in the absence of any proof that things are going to work out? " The practices I'm about to share are not about convincing yourself that things are going to be okay. They are not rational conversations to have in your head. They're about training that second sort of hope, about training your capacity to orient toward hope. Not because the future is promising, not because you should, not because it's better. I don't know if any of that is true or not, but rather we do this because in spite of all of that, you are still here. You're still listening to this podcast. You're still caring, you're still desiring, you're still exploring, you are still engaged with the world.

Speaker 2: So the first practice I want to offer is this notion of rerelating to hope as an orientation. And I want you to try something, not to feel better, but just to notice wherever you are, I don't want you to change your mood. Just notice your body. And now ask yourself, not intellectually, but sort of somatically quietly. What am I still oriented toward? When all else fails, when all else leaves me, what do I orient toward? Not what you believe in, but what you lean toward. This could be protecting your family. It could be connection with others. It could be creating like you just, no matter what, you always lean toward creation. It could be reducing harm. It could be survival. It could be understanding, like trying to seek learning and understanding. There's no right or wrong. You don't even need to like the answer that your body shows you.

Speaker 2: You just need to notice it because whatever it is, that orientation holds hands with hope. It is a version of hope. That's what I mean by vital hope. It's not a story you tell yourself about the future, but it's a direction that you keep facing even when you're tired, even when you're in a real sort of state of fuckinness, even when you're afraid, because you can't help it. Whatever that direction is is going to be different for every single one of us. There's no right or wrongs here. And we likely don't call it hope. It probably doesn't even feel like hope. But again, remember, I think hope actually feels pretty differently than the Bill of Goods were sold about it. So we might call it learning or connecting or creativity or whatever, but it is a flavor of your unique hope as an orientation. And I find this incredibly helpful that when I feel lost or alone or burnt out, I don't have to change my beliefs.

Speaker 2: Thank God. I don't have to argue with reality. I don't have to deny that things in Minneneapolis right now are horrific and I can also reorient. So instead of pointing toward or leaning toward doom, I can remind myself of where I point and tap into that or where I want to point to and I can reroute myself. That's the embodiment of hope and it feels really sweet to me, much sweeter than feeling like I should feel hopeful or optimistic or trying to convince myself to believe something that I don't when shit is awful. So practice one is this. Practice orienting yourself in the direction that you lean. So getting curious about where you lean and orienting that way on purpose as often as you want, as often as you need, and as often is going to be stretchy for you to work out your muscles.

Speaker 2: Practice number two, I'm calling this behavioral hope. Hope can be treated like a belief or a value or a feeling that's not wrong, or it can also be treated as a behavior. Intellectual hope, so that's the belief oriented hope. And remember, it's not bad. It's just not as useful. Intellectual hope asks, "Do I feel hopeful enough to take action?" Vital hope asks, "What action keeps me in relationship with life, even without hope?" So if we treat hope as a behavior, we don't have to wait around for it in order to take action. You can enact hope without feeling it, which I personally find pretty relieving. So this practice is about patience with yourself, largely. And it's about knowing that we often take actions first in order to cultivate the conditions for the feeling. So these aren't behaviors because they guarantee anything. They're behaviors because they say, "I'm still fucking here.

Speaker 2: I'm still participating. I am not turning away." Hope might come later or it might not, but the capacity for it gets exercised either way. The third practice is learning to hope without an outcome. And this is the hardest and maybe the most important practice of the three because real hope, the sort of hope that survives whatever the state of reality is, the kind that survives what's happening in Minneapolis and in this country and across the world, it has no promised ideal ending. It doesn't guarantee us anything. So try completing this sentence in your mind. "Even if nothing improves, I still want to blank or I will still blank. "That desire, stripped to fantasy is hope in its most honest form. This is where intellectual hope kind of stops working, stops being helpful because intellectual hope needs a payoff. It needs proof, but vital hope doesn't.

Speaker 2: It lives in the wanting in and of itself. So whether you feel hopeful or hopeless, this practice is about detaching hope from any sort of expected outcome and still allowing desire, still allowing want. That's hope. Now let's talk about what tends to get in the way of these practices or more specifically what kind of happens when intellectual hope tries to take over again over this sort of like vital hope as an orientation. One thing that can pop up is this thought like hope feels really naive. I've had that thought a bunch. I was for sure feeling that when I gave up on hope. When hope feels naive, it's usually because we're asking to justify it intellectually, like we're asking it to prove something to us. And vital hope doesn't do that. Hope is an orientation doesn't do that. It doesn't argue with reality. It doesn't convince yourself or others.

Speaker 2: It just keeps orienting. It just is. So when you start feeling silly for wanting something beyond what is currently happening in the world, wanting something for humans beyond the endless proof points that were awful, that's your cue. You don't need better arguments to yourself. You need a different kind of hope. Hope as an orientation. Another thing that can happen and sort of cause us to stumble is this thought, I don't feel anything. And when that's true, because it will be true sometimes. Sometimes we all feel numb. Go back to this notion of behavioral hope. Numbness isn't the absence of hope. I had that as a misunderstanding when I gave up on hope. I sort of thought this general numbness I had was just the fundamental absence of my ability to be hopeful. I don't think that's true. I think numbness is the absence of sensation, any sensation at all.

Speaker 2: And vital hope can exist without sensation. It can exist without feeling. It can exist without thought. It often shows up first as movement. So go to a museum and just let a piece of art move you or play your favorite song and be present with it and allow it to stir something inside you or go watch kids play at recess at a school nearby or sit in front of a tree that's growing somewhere. It just logically doesn't make sense to grow and marvel at it. Put yourself in the way of hope, not to cheer yourself up, not to convince yourself that everything's going to be okay, but to remind your system what it feels like to be in contact with life, regardless of what you're feeling inside. That capacity to be in contact with life in spite of the circumstances around us, that is my definition of hope.

Speaker 2: Another block that can sometimes pop up is this notion that hope hurts. And yeah, y'all a lot of times it does. For many of us, certainly for me, hoping hurts because we deeply care about someone or something that isn't going how we think or feel it should. And that pain doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. It doesn't mean you're hoping wrong. It just means you're confusing your desire, your care with an expected outcome. It is true that numbness tends to hurt less than hoping. It's way less vulnerable. It's like a state of protection of cocooning, but it also costs us a lot more. So the question becomes, how do you honor the tenderness of hope? How do you care for the hurting parts instead of abandoning them or numbing them out? Hope really requires a lot of gentleness with yourself. And vital hope is ultimately about the audacity and the capacity.

Speaker 2: I didn't intend to rhyme there, but that's neat. Audacity and capacity to come into contact with life directly, even when things are on fire, even when you don't feel like it, even when you feel hopeless. So let's zoom out to summarize. Hopelessness is not the enemy of hope. I think forced hope is the enemy of hope. And that's how I used to orient to hope and it hurt and that's why I broke up with it for a while. Hopelessness often clears the ground for hope. It removes fantasy. It makes room for something truer. It acknowledges the reality and the state of things, but hope can survive that. Hope survives hopelessness because it's not fragile. It doesn't make promises. It doesn't justify. It doesn't explain. It doesn't need proof. It simply just stays. It is just an innate part of you that wants to lean forward.

Speaker 2: And sometimes we have to cultivate that on purpose. So I'm not here to tell you to feel hopeful. I'm here to tell you that if you're still listening, choosing, caring, still oriented or anything at all, frankly, you're already practicing hope. Even if you don't believe in it, even if you don't like it, even if you wish you could stop, and even if you love it. Hope doesn't ask for permission. It's just sort of what life does in spite of itself. And it's how you point in spite of yourself. And the question is, can you come back into relationship with that? Thanks for being here today, friends. One little plug I'm going to make, if you are the reflective sort of person, I want to invite you to consider joining my Patreon for any donation of any dollar amount, like literally $1 a month. You get weekly devotionals with a theme.

Speaker 2: I'm doing monthly themes this year and you get quotes to fuel you every week and you get reflection prompts and practice suggestions. It's sort of like a little weekly devotional. And it's another way you can support the podcast or that you can hang out with me between episodes. So just an open invitation. All right, my friends. More coming in the months ahead. I appreciate each of you for being here and may you make hope. Bye for now, my friends.