Hope of the Wrong Thing

I’m glad to be here, writing to you. 

The day after I sent my last newsletter, I went for a walk in the woods with a dear friend who is also a small business owner. We started our businesses around the same time almost ten years ago, and have had regular business meetings ever since. This walk wasn’t an official biz meeting, but I took the opportunity to talk through what I thought my pace should be like for podcasting and writing again. 

In the black box of my mind, I imagine myself zipping prolifically back from five months away to make up for the blank space of taking it. Words like dedicated, consistent, and push fly out of my mouth, they’re like mad wild birds escaping the cage. 

“Weekly,” I say, with firm conviction. “I want to put the podcast out weekly. Do a newsletter weekly. A blog too, but maybe not weekly for that.” 

My dear friend pushes back. I don’t like it. I love her for it. She knows me so well. We talk it through and at first I resist. The time away has created an urgent need that doesn’t give a shit about reality.

I often say that when I was drinking it wasn’t about alcohol, it was about hope. I would wake up wincing, futilely searching my memory for what could have happened when I was blacked out the night before. And then I’d stop looking, deliberately walk away from reality, replacing it with the comfort of hope. I’d velcro myself to that comfort, able to breathe easier as I returned to my familiar favorite idea: I could quit drinking today. I could quit, I would never ever have to wake up hungover again, never have to get blackout drunk again. I could be the person I truly longed to be. I’d sense that person there with me, looking at me with interest, inviting me in. But then I’d turn from her gaze, looking instead into the comforting eyes of hope. Hope gave me the relief of not being with who I really was in that moment. 

The weekly podcast plan is a kind of hope too. But it’s hope for the wrong thing. It’s not hope grounded in reality. And hope that’s not grounded in reality creates plans that are bound to fail. I should know, I hoped I could quit drinking for 27 years before I finally decided it was time to actually quit instead of putting my energy into hoping I could. That oversimplifies it, but you probably know what I mean.

Hope is a slippery slope. It feels good. But so often what I hope for isn’t coherent with my reality. It doesn’t take into account the amount of clients I have or my other responsibilities. It doesn’t know what time is, and turns into magical thinking lickety split. Hope is about the future. Reality is about the present. 

I listened to two podcasts this week: 

Radical Simplicity: The Opportunities of a World in Collapse with Sarah Wilson

and

The Collapse of Our Mythology: Can Humanity Choose What’s Next? with Charles Eisenstein

and I’m reading Sarah Wilson’s new book, I Eat The Stars. All of them reminded me about how hope is useful and also dangerous, and that reminded me of this part of a poem by T.S. Eliot I heard Elizabeth Gilbert talk about several years ago called East Coker: 

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony

Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating

Something I have said before. I shall say it again.

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

As the dissonance of the world gets louder and louder, my urge to turn to hope is strong. Hope lets me overcommit, overfunction, live life alongside my life, in a way that keeps me in my head, in my thoughts, in planning and thinking. It intellectualizes my senses, distances me from my body, and creates pathways that lead me away from discomfort and uncertainty. 

I wonder how hope relates to control, what it is about it that brings us to the far reaches of our capabilities only to toss us onto the rocks of our limitations and then apologize so sweetly that we come back to it again and again. I feel battered and bruised by the kind of hope I’ve held onto for so long that tells me any day now things will be okay again. That things will go back to normal. They will not. 

My dear friend offered me reality. I didn’t want it. I wanted to ride the energy of that hope as long as I could. I wanted to prove that I was good and had nothing to be ashamed of. I wanted to be a person who could do it all, effortlessly. No problem. See? I’d say, with a self satisfied smile. I knew I could do it. 

What she kindly reminded me of is what it would cost me. How that kind of hope is happy to loan me capability, but will collect on the debt somehow, somewhere. I know who pays the price, I know who takes the blame. I can pretend I don’t know, I can hold reality at a blissfully ignorant arms length, but it will come back around. I know the person who compensates for the unreality of that particular hope is me. 

I also know other things, like: my work gives me pleasure, and I do better work when I’m not rushing. Reality lets me be the person writing every day because it also lets me be a person. Somehow, working more and trying harder can be a personification of hope. My plan to put out a podcast weekly comes from a deep desire to have the ability to do so. But that desire cannot ignore the reality of the life that created it. It’s a both/and. 

Hope is not bad. It can bring lightness to our hearts and give us the will to go on. But too much of it creates a world where we become powerless to affect our own lives. We need reality to limit hope. We need both. I love writing, and I love making podcasts. It takes hours and hours for both, but for me it’s time well spent because it fills my cup. Hope plays a big part in that. It feels good. It seems counterintuitive to say reality is what helps and inspires me most, because reality isn’t the most pleasant or pretty. It’s brutally honest, and often disappointing. But I’ll be damned if I don’t love that steady ground.