hope is a child

 

I give up far too often.

And I don’t think it as a failing on my part, even though I should probably work on it. I pick up my pen to write about my day, to sketch or to recount a joke my friend made, and I feel the slow fire of destruction looming behind me. How do you keep going forward in life when you have the reminder in the back of your head that halfway across the globe, somebody who looks exactly like you and your family is getting killed for merely existing? I drop my pen because “the world will end in four years if you don’t do anything NOW”, but I am only nineteen, I have not gotten my driver’s license yet – how do I save the world?

And it’s funnier still that this phenomenon has become so global that we have several words for it. Doomscrolling. Climate anxiety. When all you can do is stare at your phone and do nothing, the guilt of existing consuming you whole – how can you possibly go back to your mind-numbingly capitalist life after this?

You could talk about it of course; there is a point to it being a globally shared experience. We find the worst ways to do it, though – through addictions and art, we are dishonest in our pretense. Because the truth is that you love this world, all that you have learnt and loved is of this soil and she has hurt you and now you hide in a corner, licking your wounds. To express is to die – to be honest is to bare yourself out to be examined and scrutinized; your life and your pain, now a piece of tragic art to be subjected to criticism.

(If we were honest more enough, I think we would be less coherent.)

The other day I did it again. I gave up. And the response I got was “I don’t think anyone really ever gives up.” I wanted to laugh, point out how that was so unbelievably wrong, to scoff and walk away but then – like a flash of thunder on a sunny day, I think of the indomitable human spirit. Do we really ever give up?

We think hope to be so weak when really, is there anything that speaks more to our resilience as a species? When all else plundered the earth, we were still left with hope. We are born with hope, and kindness is the greatest strength we are bestowed with. The world teaches you time and time again that you are at fault for it but you are not. I know I say this like a petulant child but I can make it sound like a convincing argument, I promise.

Hope is kind, and she is the only thing that has persevered in all of humanity. Dynasties have collapsed, kings have been murdered and whole races of people were subjugated through unbearable pain – but hope has always persevered. She is battered and she drags her body through this war zone we call the earth, she looks like she could fall any second, but she lifts up her fists and you catch the flash in her eye – she will never fall.

And maybe I dream far too much. Maybe I hope for a kinder world where things will be easier for my siblings, and I do not have to pretend to be cynical. I say that I give up but then I sigh and keep going, over and over – because there is something so disgustingly stubborn in me – the same petulant child that responds with a simple ‘no’ when I hear someone say that the world is cruel.

Because the world is cruel and we still find the time to love. All things end – and so what?