Hopelessness – KM Huber's Blog

The past is a well deep, full-bodied and well-aged hope. Just a single sip, sweet and cool, can quench the thirst of an arid and errant present. It’s tempting to drink away the life I have in favor of one already done. After all, I know how it all turns out but that’s not why I visit.

The past is a draft deep enough to launch hope full-sail, an acceptance of what is done is done and cannot be changed– at the helm am I, confident in the knowledge that it cannot. If there is value in the past, and I think there is, it is to immerse myself in the thought of then–remembering who I was–without judgment and with the benefit of who I am now.

After all, I am only visiting the past, not staying. I have no intention of repeating it. In acceptance, I study what happened, turn it inside out, peel back every layer of the why and how. How else to learn from being alive? Experience primes the pump.

There are times I am tempted to stay, like these days in a world growing dark with fear but my well would soon run dry without me living in the day to day. To drink of the past is sobering, no matter how refreshing its waters, but it’s not where I live.

Acceptance exposes all lies, opening my eyes to life as it is, especially when it isn’t the life I would have. Acceptance frees fear and without it, I can do a lot, even as one person. Living without fear is to live with equanimity, it knows no bounds, but that takes courage. Finding it may be the hope of the present.

The world seems drunk on fear. Increasingly, it is a globe of nation-states (large and small), each devoted to its own brand of isolationism, every day another hill to die on. It is as if the world has lost its past with its walls for the white, the straight, the binary. Everyone else, excluded.

Nationalism has never served our species other than to take us back to the cave, guard our fires fiercely, and stay drunk on stories inflated with glory that cannot stand the light of day. Without acceptance of who we have been, the past is a well too deep. To sip of hope is not for the faint of heart.

Sexuality and the color of skin are the story of humanity, a well of experience that never goes dry because it is never revisited for its failure because of what might be found: another way to live. Not one way for everyone but for everyone a way. Accepting who we are as we are.

Until now, there was enough time and space to accommodate world wars, nuclear bombs, and xenophobia but our lust for more has eliminated resource after resource. Rain forests have been generous for millennia but we have not been grateful.

We are at the end of thousands of years of history, on the precipice of deciding who will sip from precious waters and breathe air not yet too thin. There is no cave left in which to hide.

It’s tough, beginning at the end, having squandered all we once had and tougher still accepting what we have done but we are not without hope, and we can live without fear if we live without walls and with boundaries. I wonder how many generations will have the opportunity to try.

Endings are beginnings. There is a true fondness for that idea among us. It has a clean slate feel to it, but slate scraping will not take us to the core of who we are, a deeply flawed species. Best to begin as we are, ragged and rough, without lofty ideals, alive in our pain, but with succor from where all beginnings flow, our past.

I have spent time in caves sitting round false fires–too many years those– nothing I can do but accept every moment of them and not return. There is no life in firelight, its glow becomes all, only with the rising sun does light blind, like truth.*

Our planet can do very well without us but for now, it is where we live. May we be generous.

*My recent post, “Fascism, a False Twilight,” explores Albert Camus’ idea of light blinding like truth. The post seems a prequel to this one.

What I return to, time and again, is the sliver of hope slipped inside hopelessness. It’s so easy to miss–it’s like a well-kept secret–for without hope, hopelessness does not exist. That is so badass.

I, as a sexagenarian, have this conversation regularly with my neighbors. Some are my age but most are septuagenarian and octogenarian. I don’t gain much ground until I remind them about “badass.”

That always brings a smile. It’s a generational thing as to why they grin. I have to cite the Urban Dictionary to remind them badass is a good thing, a powerful, authentic, compassionate way of life. But I know it’s the word “badass” that takes hold as hopelessness finds itself at the curb, albeit momentarily.

A sliver of light lives in unlikely places, no matter how long the darkness lingers or how immense its presence. It is not like hope belongs to only one generation at a time. With historic eyes, hope transcends.

Badass is not an easy sell at any time. Some days, being badass means the right thing to do is way too hard. Being aware is not easy in an existence that is ever-changing. It’s not easy living from the inside out.

Being badass means meeting the storm, knowing that loss looms, accepting all escape routes lead back to the beginning. The only way through is forward. Life gives us hopelessness and within it, hope.

I have learned to lose myself in the rage of hopelessness’ storm. That takes a few badass turns of thought, believe me, but being in its storm is the only way to center myself, to sit in its eye, the hope in hopelessness.

To watch a warbler arrive. My barren landscape brighten with yellow and black, breaking through my black-gray fog. I get a glimpse of the world going on around me, as it should, for no storm is everywhere.

Nor does the winter warbler stay. It is mine to find my way to the self that is still. That journey is never the same nor should it be. It would be pointless to go through a storm and not be changed.

I don’t think it’s a matter of the storm’s rage, although I cannot say I am not affected by its ferocity. I’m just not there to do battle. I let the storm exhaust itself. Rage will do that, when left alone.

And the body adjusts to the ravage that is any disease but it does have a special appreciation for rest in any storm’s aftermath. Being has been through yet another storm and will never be quite the same.

On any day, the body delivers all it has to offer. That may be the best definition of badass yet.

*Badass note: I’m being quite selective in my definition of badass here, confining it to ethical, authentic, and compassionate behavior. The Urban Dictionary provides alternatives here.