I’ve spent much of my life thinking about hope. In recent years, I’ve spent a lot of time writing about it, too, in novels and non-fiction. Before then, I clutched on to hope like a security blanket. In my twenties, I had a breakdown. A fusion of severe depression and panic disorder that made me fall so hard, I spent three years of my life desperately wanting to die. It is hard to cultivate hope in such a state of despair, but, somehow, I gathered enough of it to stay alive and see a better future.
Hope can feel in scarce supply for everyone these days. Pandemics, brutal injustices, political turmoil and glaring inequalities can all take their toll. And yet, the thing with hope is that it is persistent. It lives even in the most troubled times. Here are 10 eternal reasons to feel hopeful.
1. We are not what we experience
I used to say, “I am a depressive.” But I wasn’t a depressive. I was a person experiencing depression. If we stand in a hurricane, it doesn’t matter how violent or terrifying the hurricane is, we always know that the hurricane is not us. It gives me immense hope during dark times to remember that the weather outside and inside us is never permanent. People talk about dark clouds over them. But if that is the metaphor, we are the sky. We are never the clouds.
2. The future is open
You don’t need to be permanently happy to be hopeful. You just need to embrace the concept of possibility. You need to accept the unknowability of the future, and that there are versions of that future which are brighter and fairer than this one. And every single one of us can play a part in creating that better world.
3. Beauty exists
Beauty heals. It exists in kindness, in nature, in each other, in the wind farm on the horizon beyond my window. I remember one night feeling suicidal and looking up at a cloudless sky of infinite stars. I felt a mental pain so deep it was physical. But seeing the sky, our glimpse at the universe, flooded me with hope that I would one day appreciate such a sight again. Beauty is any moment that makes us gasp with the hope and wonder of life, and the world is still full of such moments. They shine in the dark. And they are ours for the taking.
4. People are good
Not all people, not all the time. But this year has given us countless examples of heroism. From front-line healthcare workers to the millions of people joining the fight to end structural inequality. It may never have been clearer to see the worst of humanity, but nor has it ever been so easy to see the best of it. “Look for the helpers” has never been easier advice to follow.
5. We have each other
The hardiest plant in the world is the purple saxifrage. Its delicate petals look like they could fly away in the wind, yet it is found amid the harshness of the Arctic. The flowers survive by being clustered together, offering each other shelter against the hardest conditions on earth. Humans, too, can be saved by one another. This year has given us a million examples of how people pull together in a crisis. How neighbours turn to neighbours. Friends to friends. Allies to allies.
6. Our existence is testimony to survival
When we think of the likelihood that, after approximately 200,000 years, we’d end up here, alive, right now, as us, we are contemplating an improbability so vast it is almost an impossibility. We are the fires conjured from nothing. We exist out of impossibility. And yet we exist. So, when you feel the odds are against you, remember you once were met with impossible odds. And there you are, existing.
7. We learn in the hard times
Discomfort can be healing. The true challenge we face is to look at ourselves and the world honestly. To see what wounds are there, so we can help heal them. To not flinch. To not spend our life so wrapped in the bandages of denial we avoid pain, only by avoiding all feeling altogether. As Buddhist writer Pema Chödrön put it, “The most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”
8. Change is real
Change is the nature of life. Neuroplasticity refers to the way our brains change their structure through the things we experience. None of us are the same people we were 10 years ago. When we feel or experience terrible things, it is useful to remember that nothing lasts. Perspective shifts. We become different versions of ourselves in different versions of reality. The hardest question I was ever asked was, “How do I stay alive for other people if I have no one?” The answer is you stay alive for the people you’ll meet, and the people you’ll be.
9. Out of despair, life finds a way to bloom
Every family has an example of this. My Jewish grandmother studied at The Central School of Arts & Crafts in the 1930s and had a year’s placement at an art school in Vienna. While there she witnessed Hitler’s annexation of Austria. Immediately, Jewish people were targeted. Paraded in the street, made to clean graffiti, publicly humiliated. She escaped on the very last train to France, after flirting with the Nazi guard at the station. In London, she became a volunteer nurse and fell in love with my grandfather after he was injured during the Blitz. My father was born a few years later.
10. We have innate value
You don’t need to exhaust yourself trying to find your own value. You are not an iPhone needing an upgrade. Your value is not a condition of productivity or exercise or body shape or something you lose via inactivity. Value is not a plate that needs continually to be spun. The value is there. It is intrinsic. It is in the “being” not the “doing”.
Matt Haig is the author of The Comfort Book, The Midnight Library, Notes On A Nervous Planet, Reasons To Stay Alive and How To Stop Time, among other books
