Hope

In the only time of the year that the future vividly appears, New Year's Eve is least about ephemeral feasts, revelries, and fireworks bursting in the deep night, leaving the dying year behind and ringing in the uncertain news.

The enveloping, restless energy of enigmatic hope is far more absorbing, even if embracing that requires accepting its uncertainties.

Since, even on this morning of New Year's Eve, we're already haunted by January's two-faced door, we are bound by every rule of fairness to give the New Year credit for being a good one until he proves himself unworthy of the confidence we reposed in him.

However, the coming year turns out, that's just another uncertainty in need of living through.

Hope, meanwhile, is the only conceivable word that can be written down on the yet-empty calendar page. The coming year is still blank pages. Unknown and unknowable are our life's struggles and battles ahead.

"Life is, in fact, a battle," American novelist Henry James once wrote on facing a New Year. "On this point, optimists and pessimists agree. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small; and mankind generally unhappy…"

With evidence of insuperable suffering and destruction very much around us, the first step then in seriously reflecting on hope is knowing what hope is not.

Right off, hope is not to delude ourselves into believing everything will be fine. Hope is not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may counter the everything-is-getting-worse feeling.

Instead, correctly approaching hope starts with clearly seeing hope as our daydreams of a better and brighter world.

Though daydreams inhabit our hopes, those are things we cannot do without; those daydreams inform us of our human capabilities and possibilities as persons and as a society.

Essentially, hope enables us to have a practical, transformative attitude about ourselves and our world.

But transformative attitudes come only once we act on those possibilities that hope opens for us. 

"Hope," wrote essayist Rebecca Solnit, "locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others."

Of course, many of our hopes can turn into illusions. It's unavoidable. But even illusory hope often enlightens some of our genuine human wishes and drives, if soberly examined. 

On the other hand, realizable hope often ends up in disappointment, precisely because of hope's inherent nature of aiming for something uncertain.

But no matter the disappointments, hope's nurturing of human capacities to change oneself and the world never ceases. Hope springs eternal.

Perhaps the reason for the disappointments is the fact our human capabilities cannot yet be realized since our personal and social conditions for it to be realized aren't yet complete or have fully ripened.

Nonetheless, even if we and our world aren't ready, this shouldn't prevent us from seeking out the best practical ways to make our hopes become realities.

Not acting on our hopes, in fact, can mire us in private miseries, stuck with believing that nothing can or will change.

And, even more tragic, private depressions color how we see our society.

"There's a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or society rather than the individual is stuck. Things don't always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act," Solnit said.

Hope, then, is the radical venturing towards the not-yet in our better capacities as a person and as a society.