The Power of Hopelessness
T. S. Eliot wrote, “Wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” Everything seems to be decaying, deteriorating, falling apart. Many young women are seriously wondering how it can be a moral act to bring a child into a future that looks so grim. Many of us are looking around and wondering, “What’s the use?”
Suffering is built into life and we feel more suffering for other’s pain, the more awake you become. The universe is not going to be fixed in our lifetime, or ever. Expecting that is, like T.S. Eliot wrote, “…hope for the wrong thing.”
But allowing in hopelessness does not mean that we have to collapse or be paralyzed. We can give up the heroic fantasy that we can fix anything and still embrace action. Life, from the perspective of creative hopelessness, is just about staying awake, feeling all the sharp edges of the paradoxes around us, and being as kind as we can be to those near us. We act not to fix things, but to speak our truth, to touch another’s being, and to laugh back at the dark face of chaos. That is enough.