Read This If You're New and Trying to Find Your Way

I’m writing this letter during deeply unsettling and troubled times. We are living through extremely turbulent and horrific events, including several genocides, acute climate change, many wars, growing criminalization, increasing inequality, the rise of fascism, and much more. It feels like the world is on fire because it is. As an activist and organizer, you are sometimes called upon to be not just a firefighter but to rebuild in a new and better way. We have to help people understand what is (the current, shared reality), we must collectively imagine what can be (a future possibility), and we have to diligently labor for what must be (organizing to sustain life/​livingness and for liberation).

These days, people around me are using the word ​“despair” with regularity. Perhaps you are experiencing the same. Given the stakes, I can understand being despairing. Yet I’m with Audre Lorde, who wrote that ​“despair is a tool of our enemies.” Why do I believe this? Because despair has a way of distorting, it often pairs well with cynicism, which I see as a way of being that contracts what’s possible rather than expanding possibilities. Rather than being enabling, I have experienced it as corrosive. Are cynical people builders? I haven’t experienced them as such. I’m with Max Horkheimer, the philosopher who argued that cynicism is ​“another mode of conformity.” I heard writer Maria Popova say in a podcast interview that she lives in ​“defiance of despair.” This resonated with me. It’s my experience that taking positive collective action can crowd out despair. It offers a little bit of light and helps you to perceive yourself and your community more clearly.

I’m regularly asked about hope. I’ve said that for me hope is a discipline, a practice that I engage in daily (and on some days hourly). Sometimes people say to me that hope is a disposition, and that you either have it or you don’t. I vehemently disagree.

Some people seem to think of hope as ​“wishful thinking.” For me, it’s not that at all. Rather, because I don’t know how things will turn out, I choose to take action in the direction that I want to influence. I devote my efforts to making what I want to happen actually happen. Nothing can happen if we don’t take action. As Annie Dillard writes: ​“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” I would add that how you do anything is how you do everything.

Action is a practice of hope. Put another way, hope is generated through action. ​“Doing” allows us to derive experience and meaning — it is through doing that we experience feeling. I’m interested in a robust and active hope, the kind of hope that has dirty and calloused hands.

So I wake up every single day and decide to practice hope. The reason I do so is that this is something that falls solely under my control. I can’t control social forces, but I can choose to practice hope by taking my own considered daily actions. I have learned a lot from Joanna Macy’s concept of active hope. For Macy, active hope doesn’t require optimism. We can cultivate it no matter how we are feeling (for example, you can still cultivate hope while you grieve, while you feel despondent, and so on). Hope makes room for itself, beside every emotion. Hope is not the belief that everything will turn out well — that’s optimism, and I’m not an optimist. 

I’m also interested in how Joan Halifax invites us to lean into uncertainty and the unknown as we practice what she calls wise hope. We are always going to be surprised in good and bad directions. That grounds me. I know things change all the time, even though I never know what direction that change will take. 

I don’t know how things will turn out, but I am committed to something other than this — the current structure and state of this world. We can live differently. I don’t think we have to live the way we currently do. I think something else is possible. The social theorist Henri Giroux writes that ​“hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present.” So I invite you, young ­organizer, to embrace uncertainty as a terrain of glorious possibility. Let this uncertainty ground you rather than make you fearful. 

I know that hope isn’t something everyone embraces, and I respect this. I usually tell my loved ones who adamantly reject it that it’s okay if they give up hope, so long as they don’t give up trying. Don’t give up on taking action. Our present actions matter, even though we do not know how the future will turn out. I’m with Grace Lee Boggs, who said: ​“We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of critical mass. It’s always about critical connections.”

Every time we choose constructive action, it builds toward the possibility of freedom and liberation. 

So as long as I am alive, I’m going to keep trying every day. That’s my commitment. Every morning that I have breath, I stay rooted in possibility and I choose to act. And I remember that doing so doesn’t preclude feeling burdened or needing relief.

There’s a poem by Brendan Kennelly that I appreciate titled ​“Begin,” and I love this part in particular because for me, it speaks to hope as a discipline:

So, young organizer, make space in your life to begin again every single day. Be astonished at mundane things in your world. Build positive actions into the fabric of your life. As Emily Raboteau has said, the ​“future is not foreclosed.” We’ll get through this together. That’s a promise.

In peace,

Mariame