A message on Hope
My 16-year-old son recently admitted to me in an off-hand way that he sometimes worries the planet won’t be here by the time he is an adult. I had never heard this deep fear he carries so it caught me off guard. When I asked more questions, his teenage brain was focused on something else and the precious door to his vulnerability had shut.
Since then I have thought often about this interaction, and wondered, how many young people share this fear of the world ending? How many adults worry about this?
Rebecca Solnit writes that “People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.”
Perhaps the mind can more clearly imagine extinction happening instead of the elbow grease and commitment it takes to birth new possibility. Taking action, imagining solutions, and enacting new patterns all require us to wake up and shake up the world we live in.
Hope seems essential now. To hope is to imagine those sidelong paths and the possibility that each of us can influence outcomes. That what we do actually does make a difference.
I have literally been bathing in the construct of hope for the last few months in preparation for the beginning of TEND HER 4.0, a large grant-funded online mental health prevention program that I teach. All of this programming is FREE and begins March 31 – more details below.
In the words of Michelle Obama, “Hope is making a comeback!” Join me this coming Wednesday for Wisdom Wednesday as we explore HOPE and mark your calendars to register on March 12 for Tend Her 4.0 and register on April1 for the in person Hope Summit.
