Hope in times of darkness 💫
hopeful cat mate
This piece also features in I FEEL FOR YOU podcast episode 47.
hope
sometimes means completing a simple task with love.
sorting papers, doing some filing. watering plants.
placing our hope in something when the world
feels hopeless.
a meditation (here’s one i made in collaboration with King Britt)
contacting a friend
planning a meal with whatever you have left in the kitchen.
in some of my most hopeless times whilst living in norway,
living hand to mouth and hungry,
i’d look for 1 kroner pieces on the floor outside of supermarkets.
…is that stealing? i mean, i like to think of it as offerings.
i’d gather any small shrapnel to make it work,
and try to find something affordable from my local ethnic shop.
a potato, a leek. a carrot.
and challenge myself to pulling together a meal with limited ingredients.
you get creative when you’re poor.
and i had lots of practice with it. no sob story,
cause those days although testing, reinforced a resilience within.
of course, i’d had practice years before, growing up poor also gives you that too.
you make magic from nothing at all.
and i’m not trying to glamourise being poor.
it’s so hard.
but, i do think there is something to be said with creating something from not a lot.
be that the act of making something with limited resources,
doing something without necessarily having the guidance or tools,
believing without necessarily having the encouragement.
resilience.
it can be automatic to distrust possibility.
we might be used to denying ourselves goodness and ease
because we’re used to disappointment and pain.
we get trapped in lack.
scarcity.
fear.
it takes over.
so, practice is necessary.
optimism is sometimes framed against reality,
but i don’t believe it to be true.
optimism requires resilience.
to know the very real factors that might be stacked against you,
but to believe anyway.
even if it doesn’t work out
even if another terrible thing happens
even if we trip up
obviously, hopefully we learn and reframe and reevaluate,
we become resilient by practice
and decide to show up again.
resilience as action.
hope as practice.
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