When it is hard to feel hopeful

There are many things happening in the world that challenge me to find hope in the face of them. Climate change is a huge one. The political climate of the United States another. The ongoing wars overseas yet one more. There continues to be rampant injustice in so many ways, in so many places; our list could go on and on.

But making that list definitely doesn’t help me to feel hopeful, nor to feel like anything I do or say could make much difference, so I’m going to stop there.

Reading the news today, I started imagining all the ways things might get worse. I felt that tightening feeling in my chest where it feels like the weight of the world’s problems might drag me down into some scary abyss.

So, instead, I tried to make myself think about what I can do for myself when it feels hard to be hopeful, and an idea for a new practice struck me. Call it a spiritual practice, call it a self-care practice, call it whatever, but I think it is something I’m going to start trying to do daily. (Or as close to daily as I do anything!)

Instead of imagining all the ways things could get worse, I want to start imagining the world I want to live in. I mean really envisioning it. This made me think of the quote often attributed to Ghandi:

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

I want to start to see the changes I wish in the world, even if only in my mind’s eye. So here’s my vision for today, my first day of practice:

Much of the National Mall has been reverted to native meadow, no longer a monoculture lawn. Another portion, a developing food forest. I am walking home past what was once the Tidal Basin, where what is left of the Jefferson Memorial sits much deeper in the waters of the Potomac. Tourists kayak in the shade beneath its curved dome; ospreys have nested on top. I’m on a boardwalk above the marshy edges of the water, still lined by many Yoshino Cherry trees, but now also Black Cherries and American Plums that have been added to the managed forest. I stop to collect some fruit to take home.

That may be enough for today. It would be impossible to envision the whole of our new world all at once. It is impossible for me to even imagine it all on my own; I need others to imagine this world we’ll share. There are so many things I don’t know enough about to see them clearly enough. Many of the things we will imagine may not even be possible, but in picturing a different world we take tiny, tiny steps closer to its reality.

Tomorrow perhaps I’ll continue to imagine urban food forests and how the landscape of urban environments will change to better help the people and the land. Or maybe I’ll imagine ways that we will travel, or shop, or communicate, or entertain ourselves that are gentle to our environment and helpful not only to humanity, but to the many beings we live with on this planet.

The practice, I think, will be to create these very intimate, detailed visions of the world to come. I say “I think” because I’m not sure exactly what this will turn into.

What I am sure about, though, is that doing this helped me feel a lot more hopeful, and a hell of lot better than imagining all the ways that things might get worse.

I invite you to envision the world you want to see too.