Hope in Short Supply

I realized the other day that hope seemed in short supply in my cupboard of reserves. I was checking my inventory and recording the levels of patience, tolerance, kindness, empathy, and I noticed that hope was all but depleted. That’s never a good thing, but … it got me thinking.

I have restricted myself from looking too far ahead due to the pandemic. I’m not thinking about my next visit with daughters and grandchildren. It’s too risky an endeavour to imagine gathering them up in my arms. I’m not letting myself be filled with anticipation for spring flowers, though my eyes are seeking them out, in a covert sort of way. I’m trying my very best to ignore the ache of being homesick. I’m working at living in the moment, but I seem to be using more of a head down approach than actually being grateful for the moment I am in, the two at serious cross purposes. Living in the moment shouldn’t suspend our hope, but rather embrace it.

I had a friend while growing up who expected nothing from life, nothing from friends, nothing from chance. She wasn’t unhappy, not at all, but when blowing out her birthday candles she didn’t bother to make a wish. This precluded her from experiencing disappointment. I thought her wise, at the time but later I wasn’t so sure. My approach feels similar these days, as if I am holding my breath without taking note that I am not breathing. That may not make a lot of sense.

I was reading in The Guardian a series of essays offering perspectives on the effect of the pandemic on our souls. These writers were eloquent in their description of what coping looks like on some days and how fragile it can be on other days.

The very notion of hope finds its seed in the dark, much like the tiny cotyledon pushing from the seed’s shell, bracing its back against the soil to find its way to the light, to the air and sunshine. It is the dark’s force on the seed that allows for that new life. My hope is depleted not because of the dark, but because I do not acknowledge the despair I feel, refusing to confess missing my children because it seems, at first glance, to be self-absorbed when others have endured much greater loss and confinement.

Above my desk I have the words of Albert Camus printed for me to look at each time I sit down to write. The words were included in the front of my first book. “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” I read those words every single day. Camus was regarded as an existentialist philosopher. I can neither argue for or against such a label, but those words of his mean a great deal to me. Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at the age of forty-four. I am not all that familiar with his body of work and I am not certain he would be in agreement with the classification of his writing where “human life is, objectively speaking, meaningless.” I prefer to think he saw one life, his or another’s, as being no more or less meaningful than any other, and it is in that assumption that I find comfort, where I find hope.

I used to think hope meant looking forward, but maybe hope is the sense of being wrapped in a warm blanket in this particular moment and trusting the dark to show us we know our way home.

wendistewart@live.ca