In the book I’ll Be You, hope is described as “the blind, naive belief that things might someday be a tiny bit better than they are now.” There are many other definitions and opining. We know Emily Dickinson says hope has feathers and Nietzsche thinks it’s evil and Greta Thurnburg says it’ll come when action is taken.

Elie Wiesel and Nelson Mandela see it more relationally. Wiesel says it’s a gift we give each other. And Mandela says, “Our human compassion binds us the one to the other—not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.”

Weirdly, I kinda resonate with all of these takes. Blind hope with no action (in many situations) isn’t very viable, and dashed hopes can breed suffering. But, weirdly, the hope reference I hear the most is by choice. Now, I’m not a huge Lana Del Rey fan, but her song “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it” hits for me as a chronically ill person. The mentions of debutantes, white dresses, and Bowery Boys—they don’t hit for me. But the sort of, “despite everything I still have hope” vibe is the thing.

It probably doesn’t need saying, but chronic and progressive illnesses are pretty good at sucking hope out of life. Like, literally, shit’s not gonna get better. That’s real. And without medical research or people in power with compassion—rather than disdain—for people with disabilities, it seems doubtful that breakthroughs will be forthcoming.

Even with all of that said, it can sound depressing and fatalistic when I say I don’t have hope for a cure or that I’ll get better. But, for me, that’s just acceptance. And that acceptance is the foundation upon which I can build hope for other things, and other people.

Like the aerial roots of the tree above, I think hope needs to be multifaceted, relational, and action-oriented. We’re stronger together, reaching. When I lose balance, someone might catch me. When they get lost, I might find them. That’s hopeful, to me.

And with an illness—or in times of calamitous threats to democracy, say—hope can feel like a dangerous thing. It’s always precarious, but it can also feel like daring fate, like baiting disappointment and despair. And that’s fair. For example, remember when I was told my kidneys were probably fine, even after a diagnosis of kidney disease? And there should be no take-backs? Well, they took it back. The ultrasound shows some tomfoolery that now means seeing a urologist, cuz being a passed-around problem no one wants to solve is the way of modern medicine. I’m sure you have your own plentiful examples of hopes dashed. But maybe it’s less about the wide-eyed, dewy positivity that isn’t already marred by suffering. Maybe it’s more like the pain-induced, compassion-borne gift we can give each other.

The Pueo owl is endangered, rare. Seeing it is understood as a blessing of sorts. It’s fierce and graceful. Dangerous, some rodents might say. It’s still threatened, fighting for its own survival. But it can’t help but carry on.

Today might feel hard—hopeless even—for all kinds of reasons. But in each other, in our environment, maybe we can find that faint rainbow, a collective strength, a rare fierce thing with feathers to carry us into the next moment, a bit more hopeful than before. I hope that for you today.

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