with Krista

Krista Tippett: At some point across the last few years in my interviews on On Being, I began to ask people sometimes as a closing question, "What is making you despair, and what is giving you hope?" And something that was really fascinating that emerged is that I noticed the answers to those two questions were conjoined. That what people were hopeful about and despairing about were not separate, not opposites, but in a kind of interplay and relationship — that hope lives really close to our despair, and despair lives close to our hope, right on the other side of it. Which is fascinating.

And it makes me think about the vitality and reality-base to the kind of muscular hope that we are going to be exploring with this experiment. I know that "vitality and reality-based" is not necessarily hope's reputation. But I think I want to invite you to take a moment now, or later today, to answer that question for yourself. Right now, today, what is making you despair? What is filling you with despair? And what is giving you hope? Don't analyze what you've written. Just let it be a beginning.

I want to name, also, right here, at this beginning, that there is so much in our world right now that evokes a profound, reasonable hopelessness — such a magnitude of suffering that the wisest of words and spiritual solace can't address. And yet, looking back, I see hope as a defining, recurrent, ever-present feature of every wise and graceful person, every wise and graceful life I've come into conversation with. And that includes people who have shifted the world on its axis in small ways, in vast ways.

So to approach this contradiction, this puzzle, definitions are called for, like other words we need most, like the word “love.” The word “hope” is a little bit ruined from overuse and from flimsy, superficial use. So let's talk first about what it's not. When I talk about hope, about muscular hope, I am not talking about anything to do with wishful thinking. It's not really idealism. I don't use the word “optimism.” I understand that some people use the word optimism the way I use the word hope. But to me, optimism has a bit of a feel of a faith that things in the end will turn out all right. And that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about hope as an orientation more than a virtue, a way of seeing and moving through the world. And it is a choice. In the face of profound, reasonable despair it is a calling, it is a practice, a muscle. And, like any muscle, it can be flexed and strengthened.

I want to say it this way, too. The hope that interests me, that I have learned from conversation by conversation, teacher by teacher, across 20 years — this kind of hope attends to reality in all its complexity. And it makes a leap of imagination that has real-world consequences. Here's one way to define this kind of hope: It looks the world full on, it looks reality in the face, and it refuses to accept that things have to be this way. And then this orientation of hope throws one's intelligence, one's energy, one's persistence, one's creativity, and courage behind that insistence.

It's one of these elemental truths that we have to remind ourselves of, sometimes name in order to see: that nothing new has ever entered this world without someone or someones who first imagined a possibility others couldn't yet see or believe in, and then brought realities into being that most of us can later not imagine the world without. Again, this is a truth that has small manifestations and vast manifestations, individual and communal. And this is a young century in which we have a world to remake, all of our disciplines, all of our communities. And it is in this context that I see a revitalized, chosen, practiced, applied hope — individual and communal — as urgent and necessary towards that possibility of a different world.

So, what follows is an exercise in mustering this muscular hope towards that possibility. And we are taking six exquisite teachers who I think of as — to use a phrase that was offered to me by the wonderful civil rights elder, Vincent Harding — "live human signposts." I think of each of these voices, these teachers, as live human signposts. So not just in what they say, but in how they live, they demonstrate, they teach this kind of muscular hope, what it looks like, how it grows, how it acts in the world. And they each have different perspectives on how to nurture it and strengthen it inside ourselves and in our interactions with others. I'm going to refer, from time to time, in these different sessions to this experience as "a course". I don't know if it's a course. I think it's an experiment that you're embarking on with me and with On Being, and I hope in the company of others in your world.

Here's another truth I think we have to remind ourselves of again and again. I said hope is more an orientation than a virtue, but it is a virtue. And none of the great virtues are meant to be carried alone. None of them. We err on the side of individualism in this American culture, from which I come. So none of the great virtues are meant to be carried alone. And especially with something like hope or something like love in a time like this, in a world like this — we are called and invited to surround ourselves with others who can walk this path with us and carry something like hope on the days, the weeks, the years when it's too much for us to ask of ourselves.

There's a second layer beyond the listening to this experience, this experiment, which is journaling. But really it's more than journaling. So I want to explain this fuller idea I have of what is happening in the act of writing things down. Our teacher on that is going to be Naomi Shihab Nye. And one of the things that she brings into relief — that has really shifted the way I have probably written every word down since I heard her — is that when we write things down, we get into conversation with ourselves and with the many selves inside us, the multiplicity inside us. So there are going to be prompts and journal pages to download within each session. You can print out as many pages as you want and write as much, or draw as much, or scribble as much as you want, and in as big letters as feels fun and useful. And, of course, you could type if you'd like, but I hope you'll consider writing by hand. Because when we write by hand, as old-fashioned as that is, we are processing emotionally.

These prompts are going to have two purposes. Again, we're in the realm of virtue and moves of character. So one of them is not, in the first instance, about being purposeful and action-oriented, but about inward preparation and settling. Spiritual preparation. That becomes the ground we nourish for taking the questions and insights that rise up, the wisdom about the nature of hope, how it acts, how it looks, into the ordinary interactions of our days. We move back and forth in a life of depth and meaning between that inner work and that outer work in a spirit of curiosity — curiosity also being a quiet moral muscle that makes almost all the other virtues possible.

And there's a neuroscience behind what I'm talking about, too: that what we practice, we become. Some of this — moving through your days, taking in these teachings — you may not feel it. But you're doing it. And then moving back into inward work, seeing what that shifts in you. And does this way of moving through the world with a robust hope, does that become spiritual and moral muscle memory? That's what the neuroscience says it can become.

I think it's important to name, finally, that a lot of us are trained — whether we've spent a lot of time thinking about this or not — to think of cynicism and a critical orientation as more rigorous and respectable, more honorable and intelligent, than hopefulness. So as you start to delve, in the first instance, into what hope means for you, what this is that we're walking into, it may be more complicated than you expect.

In the journals I'm going to offer these prompts, which I will share with you now too — a way to begin this experience. Just spend some time reflecting on what is the nature of hope, the meaning of hope, in the way you think and feel, what you move towards, what you're wary of? What does hope mean where you come from, your home, your childhood, your people? Another way in to ground that same investigation, that I learned from some Benedictine monastics who formed me as I started this radio adventure a long time ago — they would pose a big beautiful question and ask people to answer the question through the story of their lives. So here's another way you might journal: What is hope? Answer the question through the story of your life.

Let all of this surface as you begin here.

The final offering I'd like to make for now — and it's important — is another quality of hope that is always present, and so vivid in my mind as I think back about all these live human signposts of hope: A life of hope is at once fierce and persistently joyful. Joyful. I want to suggest that you have also seen this in your life, in the world around you, if you summon the faces of people who you have known up close, who are hopeful. A radiance that is there — not every minute of every day, but definingly in a life of applied hope, in people who have flexed this muscle of hope so that it has come to define them. This is what I've learned, as someone who began more cynically in my hope adventure. It's a better way to live, both in terms of the effect a person has on the world around them, but also in how we can make a home inside ourselves in order to be fully present to the world in its beauty and in its pain. So, enjoy.