“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”
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Rebecca Solnit, ‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times
Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable.
The world, then, is divided into three, not two; not just the optimists versus the pessimists in an endless argument of up and down, right and wrong, in and out. There are three, and the third are those that hope, who hold out against despair and disengagement.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/150166204452
