Our days are both rough and slippery. Hope brings traction | Psyche Ideas

The key to what Chödrön calls “getting the hang of hopelessness” lies in seeing that things aren’t going to be okay. Indeed, they’re already not okay—on a planetary level or an individual one.

Hope may be presented in different forms, but it’s always in the fine print. It’s not about starting out on top, but it’s about realizing how far you have to climb and then never giving up. And when I say never, I mean it. I don’t believe you ever reach the top, and well, if you do, you might not be dreaming big enough.

Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.

Hope, writes the moral philosopher Kieran Setiya,18 “keeps the flicker of potential agency alive.”