Hope
Season 2: Episode 010
Script
Welcome to Plan for Wonder. My name is Crystal, founder and creator of myLifeplanners.ca.
Hope.
Hope is a noun. It is not an action. It’s waiting around for our dreams to come true.
And my hope for hatred and greed to be put back in place were recently dashed, reminding me of Mark Manson’s book, “The World is Fucked; A Book About Hope”. His reflection on philosophy and the human condition was pretty much summed up this week.
Hope cares only about the problems that still need to be solved. Because the better the world gets, the more we have to lose.
After every fallout and failure, I lean back and expand my perspective beyond my own bubble in an effort to understand why.
I love a good metaphor, and when I need to reset and understand, I find nature and its systems, which have gotten us to where we are, a good place to look for answers.
Each person is a seed of potential, and our systems are the ground on which we develop.
Our ground is contaminated. The invisible systems that define the ‘status quo’ weed out anything that tries to change them.
I think the only way to make real change is to regenerate the dirt we want our seeds of potential to take root.
Right now, systems favour labels. If you don’t have the right colour, sex, perspective, or economic caste, anything good you put in gets sucked out of any life. Eaten up and excreted to create more of the same.
The only path to change is to regenerate and develop new nourishing systems that see all seeds (life) as the possibility of a self-determined potential.
After thousands of years of human society based on a one-sided definition of prosperity that benefits those at the top, changing this definition to one that benefits all will take work.
I know many are tired of fighting, but damn, we know how to work and focus our efforts on what matters to us.
It’s time to change focus and lift each other up. It’s time to change the definition of prosperity from having more to contributing our best. It’s time to choose leaders who don’t see themselves as masters, but instead as the fallible humans, we all are. It’s time that the masses stop seeing themselves as cogs in the system, and instead leaders in their own lives. Everyone is a leader. It all starts with making choices that support our well-being and understanding that our well-being requires the same from those around us. We can focus on abundance and eliminate scarcity.
Mark Manson ends his book with a hope of his own:
Instead of looking for hope try this: Don’t hope. Don’t despair either. In fact, don’t deign to believe you know anything. It’s that assumption of knowing with such blind, feverent, emotional certainty that gets us into a pickle in the first place.
Don’t hope for better. Just BE BETTER. Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined. Be a better human, and maybe if we’re lucky one day we get to be MORE than human.
Embrace all of your emotions. Let them flow, open your eyes to the fissures, and learn what really needs to be corrected, fixed, or let go of.
Pace yourself.
Rest.
Refocus on a larger perspective.
Rest.
Consider new ideas.
Rest.
Choose a new path to bring light into.
Rest.
Take risks even knowing that not everything will work out.
Rest.
Then get back up.
Stop hoping to matter in the eyes of others. Because you already matter in your own heart. In this space is your reservoir of joy. Sometimes you need to dig deeper for it, but it’s always there.
