Hopefulness, Hopelessness

By Miranda Chapman

Attachment to the binary is so generously woven into the fabric of my conditioning. The fact that I can actually ascribe meaning to anything, in any quality, is harrowing; it’s much easier to just be told what is good or bad, right or wrong. How convenient to be fed the storyline in advance, no need to feel into the moment or stand up in choice making. Ah, what a relief. If only. If only it were a relief to be reading from a script. Which is scary as shit, to break out of the imprint of generations of certain ways of being with or hiding from what’s showing up. That’s some heavy lifting: to take a different route, to open to other possibilities. Sometimes the familiar is the only thing that feels safe. This is also a mindfuck because there are some deeply unhealthy realms of my life that are so familiar and safety is a myth I have been told, and now continue to tell myself, to make its presence okay.

Hope is one of those spaces for me. Being hopeful can be darkly delusional or it can be an exercise in imagining the infinite mystery that is this human life. I struggle with that elusive middle earth: the place that doesn’t need to be weaving more fucked up fairy tales in order to maintain the status quo, and also not diving into a stuporous pool of depression and despair and setting up camp with inertia. Hopefulness and hopelessness, in their extremes, are two stark landscapes in the varied tapestry of this verdant planet for me. When I can make my way into that humbling hall of other choices, then the work I need to do to secede from the nations of the past, whose corrupt government cannot hold my gaze any longer, I am fortified and keep trudging along.

The thing is, while the script can feel easier or simpler or won’t rock the boat as much, it also deadens me and cripples parts of my heart that yearn for excavation. Adaptation, change, evolution, these monumental movements are not always gentle or graceful or pleasant to taste, touch, see, hear, smell, or intuit. But that’s exactly it for me, that story, that it’s supposed to be all of those things, so sweet and lovely, that lie, haunts my every thought, every move.

To think that life could exist without the chaos, loss, rage, terror, confusion is for me to sink into submission to that placating pill of ‘pleasure-only’ orientation that capitalism tries to force-feed me at every turn. And, while I deride capitalism I am also embedded in it. How can both things be true at the same time? My mind rails so mightily against the middle. How can anything settle if it’s not here or there? I was told everything must be clearly labeled, yourself included, never be wishy-washy, choose a side. The in-between was so demonized I came to fear it, to believe there was no solace there. And yet, there have been moments in my life that the realms of hopefulness and hopelessness showed up together, side-by-side, and with them, I experienced, for a time, a remarkable respite from fear, delusion, from having to follow any script: it became clearer to me that nothing has been written for this moment because this moment has never happened before.

So, I am turning my compass to the middle lands, the lands I know the least. Because when I am called to fight for something different, to long for and envision another possibility while also knowing there is no guarantee for the outcome I desire, I must be both hopeful and hopeless.