Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. … Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimism and pessimism.
There’s a middle ground, according to Solnit, that exists between being too positive or too negative. It’s the room where hope resides. Maybe we can find other things in that room too.
The cult British singer-songwriter Bill Fay died this past week at 81. I was only vaguely familiar with his work from Jeff Tweedy having routinely covered his song “Be Not So Fearful” (also featured in this scene of the excellent I Am Trying to Break Your Heart documentary).
I’m thankful that side of my life has continued for all my life—finding songs in the corner of the room.
For much of his life, Fay’s music lived on the periphery. His recording career started in the early ‘70s and abruptly ended only a few years afterward. Later, his career would have a resurgence of sorts after being rediscovered my musicians like Tweedy, among others.
Fay’s comment about “finding songs in the corner of the room” circles us back to something else Solnit writes of hope:
How the transformation happens … recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power.
Bill Fay didn’t occupy the limelight and our hope doesn’t have to either. This doesn’t make it any less transformational or less powerful. In fact, it does just the opposite.
Rest in peace, Bill Fay. You can read the whole newsletter here.
Street muralin the Barranco neighborhood of Lima, Perú
Earlier this month, I traveled to Lima, Perú. I wrote about it in last week’s newsletter on unity through difference:
At midweek, we were fortunate to go on a tour of Lima’s Historic Centre with workshop participants. We walked through the expansive plaza at the heart of Lima while looking at the beautiful colonial-era buildings surrounding it and the Andean foothills beyond. When we entered Lima’s stunning cathedral, I was handed a little card with a short prayer of unity on it. As I read it something immediately felt wrong. Classical music was gently playing in the background of this nearly 500-year-old cathedral and I sat down on a pew to take it all in. After a while I realized that I didn’t like how the prayer advocated for unity through “sameness” or “oneness.” If we somehow were to achieve unity through “sameness,” life would be reduced to something far less that it actually is. It reminded me of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk on the dangers of a single story, where she encourages us to see the multiple layers of people and cultures, and to fight powers that would seek to silence them. Some would argue that the silencing is already taking place. It’s why I’m appreciative of people like Kendrick Lamar, who publicly give voice to a counter narrative, both directly and symbolically. If we’re ever going to get to a place of unity, we have to do so through accepting and embracing “difference.”
This week, I started reading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. In the book, Solnit calls for continuous hope and action. And she makes an important point about the past—be it good or horrible—and how it relates to hope:
We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope.
I’m encouraged by this—to be fueled by hope as I lean forward into action. In my newsletter, I wrote about other “untold” or, perhaps, “forgotten” histories of Perú that you can read about here.
Choice is powerful. One of my favorite quotes about choice comes from the Austrian neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
The realization that we always have a choice as to how we will respond to those things going on around us, even if we can’t control them, is an empowering one. Frankl should know. As a Holocaust survivor, he faced unimaginable horrors, yet never forgot his power to choose. When everything was stripped away from him, he held to that power closely.
Frankl addresses choice in terms of how we respond to circumstances beyond our control, when our freedom has been reduced to a minimum. But what about choice in terms of the many circumstances within our power to control, when freedom abounds? I think we tend to view a choice like this:
As in the old Robert Frost poem, we consider the two roads diverging before us in the woods, and try our best to choose which one we’ll travel upon. In her book Transformative Experiences, philosopher LA Paul suggests a different way of looking at choice. She asks us to imagine having to choose whether or not we’d like to become a vampire, gaining immortality with the caveat of not having to hurt anyone. It’s a thought experiment that gets to the heart of Plato’s question, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” She writes:
When you find yourself facing a decision involving a new experience that is unlike any other experience you’ve had before, you can find yourself in a special sort of epistemic situation. In this sort of situation, you know very little about your possible future, in the same way that you are limited when you face a possible future as a vampire. And so, if you want to make the decision by thinking about what your lived experience would be like if you decided to undergo the experience, you have a problem… You find yourself facing a decision where you lack the information you need to make the decision the way you naturally want to make it—by assessing what the different possibilities would be like and choosing between them. The problem is pressing, because many of life’s big personal decisions are like this: they involve the choice to undergo a dramatically new experience that will change your life in important ways, and an essential part of your deliberation concerns what your future life will be like if you decide to undergo the change. But as it turns out, like the choice to become a vampire, many of these big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself.
So our choice might be better viewed in the following way:
“A” represents the space that is completely familiar to us, while “B” represents the space that is completely foreign to us. It’s the known versus the unknown. We only know ourselves on the “A” side of a decision. There’s no real way of knowing who we’d become if we made the choice to leave “A” behind, cross through the doorway, and enter into “B.”
This is the problem we face when making big decisions. We are biased toward our current experience in life. Going through that door and entering the unknown is often very scary, because both our experiences and who we will become are unknown. In her contemplation of the vampire problem, Maria Popova writes:
We are simply incapable of imagining ourselves on the other side of a profound change, because the present self doing the imagining is the very self that needs to have died in order for the future self being imagined to emerge.
When we choose to enter these unknown spaces, in a way, we choose to let our former self die in order for a transformed self to emerge. In her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit describes the value of such transformation and the process by which we can obtain it:
The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration—how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?
Extending the boundaries of self and becoming someone else is a difficult process. It’s far easier to stay within our comfort zone. Stepping into the great unknown is exhilarating, but it has its costs. Viktor Frankl looked at the problem of restricted freedom—when the door to possibility is closed. Unlimited freedom to open whichever door one chooses can also be problematic. There’s a reason Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom.” Looking through that open door into the abyss of the unknown can be destabilizing.
But in life, moving into the unknown is often what’s required of us, and it’s often where we should go. In The Meaning of Anxiety, psychologist Rollo May expands on Kierkegaard’s thoughts about anxiety:
Because it is possible to create—creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process)—one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself.
In any big decision, the choice we make leads us toward gaining something and losing something else. I think that much is a given. And it’s something I can accept. For me, the important thing is to keep choosing to grow. Growing is how I can create hope in a world that often seems at the brink of losing itself. It’s like what Emerson once wrote: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” I think it’s also important to remember that making small choices can also be unsettling, and if made consistently over time, can lead to big changes in a person’s character and experience of the world. Ted Chiang’s short story “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” from his book Exhalation, dives into this idea beautifully.
But even though we can’t know what’s on the other side of a big decision, I like Walt Whitman’s take in “Song of Myself” (43), on how we can enter those unknown spaces with confidence:
I do not know what is untried and afterward, But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.
It helps to look back into your past as you enter those untried future spaces. The past can provide some finite concreteness that stabilizes you from the infinite possibilities of the future. You’ve faced trials before and prevailed. You will prevail again.
Painting of Grenada and its two smaller islands, Carriacou and Petite Martinique, to the north — a happy discovery while paying a campus parking ticket in the Chancellery building at SGU
Fall is my favorite time of year. As the days get shorter, the nights get cooler, inviting you to put on something cozy and warm before gathering round a campfire with friends. By the time October rolls around, football season is well underway, as are the yellows and reds scattered amongst the once-green leaves of the Northwoods. To me, fall is comfort. I love how it leads into the holiday seasons of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas—joyous times that each conjure their own moods of nostalgia mixed with anticipation.
I’ve always been grateful to live in a place that has four seasons. While living outside of any one season, you gain a fresh perspective of all the wondrous elements that season holds and look forward to the moment it will arrive again. It’s a constant cycle of welcoming back something that’s both novel and completely familiar at the same time.
The following image from kottke.org struck me in its representation of how seasons bring change to one, isolated place, in this case a Finnish island, which is surprisingly shaped similar to Grenada.
Four seasons in the life of a Finnish island (via kottke.org)
Living abroad brings with it a strange juxtaposition of missing where you’re from while embracing where you are. I’ve been missing fall in the Midwest and all its delights, the changing of the color of leaves among them. In Grenada, there’s a rainy season and a dry season. We’re currently in the rainy season, which ends in late November. Other than scattered showers, I’ve started to wonder, “What aspects of Grenada should I be embracing while it’s my time to be here?”
This was on my mind one morning when I picked up Rick Rubin’s, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. I’ve been reading it every morning as a kind of devotional. The chapters are short and accessible, and offer a wealth of practical wisdom on cultivating creativity in your life—a perfect way to start the day. In a chapter on nature as teacher, Rubin brings up the seasons and other ways nature changes. He writes:
Nature is the most absolute and enduring. We can witness it change through the seasons. We can see it in the mountains, the oceans, the deserts, and the forest. We can watch the changes of the moon each night, and the relationship between the moon and the stars.
He goes on to talk about the wide range of color available to us in nature:
If you step out in nature, the palette is infinite. Each rock has such a variation of color within it, we could never find a can of paint to mimic the exact same shade.
Reading this really primed me (no pun intended) to intentionally embrace all of the new colors around me. As is the case with most things in life, when you catch onto an idea, other connections to that idea seem to pop up everywhere you look. Shortly after reading Rubin’s description of nature’s infinite color palette, I stumbled upon the following video from thurstonphoto.
The wave crashing beautifully in slow motion reveals a wide spectrum of blues and greens, a nuance that might go unnoticed in real time or casually missed by the unattuned eye. Anyone who comes to Grenada can see that the ocean surrounding it is made up of a vast array of blues and greens. I started to wonder if I might pull some meaning from them in the same way I would while reflecting on the reds and yellows of my home during this time of year.
Looking out over the Caribbean Sea from the campus of St. George’s University
So this October I’m contemplating blue. In his book, Theory of Colours (via The Marginalian), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe writes:
We love to contemplate blue — not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.
I relate to being drawn into a thing. Strangely, I think we are drawn into gazing out at the immensity of the ocean in a way that’s similar to how we are drawn into staring at the intimacy of a fire’s flame—one large and one small, yet both inspiring a sense of awe. Considering the connection here to the fall (warmth of a fire), I was motivated to dig (or swim?) further.
I discovered Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, via The Marginalian, and am currently working my way through it. In her book, Solnit contemplates the color blue. She starts by providing a scientific basis for why we see different shades of blue in nature and goes on to describe blue as the color of desire and longing. She writes:
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.
I found this so applicable to my current feelings of wanting to embrace Grenada while at the same time missing home. Solnit goes on to caution against fulfilling our desires through closing the great distance embodied by the blue of the ocean, in an attempt to grab hold of that which we seek. She writes:
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond […] Something is always far away.
The idea of owning your “longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed,” speaks an overwhelming truth to my soul. There is such empowerment to be found in accepting whatever uncontrolled adversity you face, and embracing those aspects of life that are within your ability to control. A shift of perspective is often all it takes. As humans, we are always longing for something, whether it be within our control or beyond it. What if we made peace with this fact and were contented to live in harmony alongside that longing instead? She concludes:
The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not … abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway. […] Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.
It is indeed a complex terrain we traverse, filled with surprising contradictions.
Various shades of ocean blue I’ve found in Grenada
I see shades of blue all around me here. The ocean is reminding me of all the beauty to be found in this place just as it reminds me of how much I long for home.
Yet, if the blue of the ocean represents a great distance between me and home, I think it also provides a connection. Wisconsin is no stranger to expansive bodies of water after all. As I sit on a beach on the southern shores of Grenada, I know that two buddies of mine may very well be sitting on the northern shores of Wisconsin. I’m content to think about them, along with many others, while I welcome new waves upon my shore.
My buddy Joe J’s tattoo, revealing the blue and green shades of Lake Superior
As a final note, I love the music of fall. For the past couple of years I’ve put together a new Halloween mix each October. The Charlie Brown holiday specials are also some of my favorites, and I love the mood that the Vince Guarldi Trio brings to each season. So in honor of where I come from and where I am, I put together an October Oceans playlist. I intentionally made it to blend together the blues and greens of the Caribbean with the reds and yellows of the Midwest. You can listen to it here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Wenninger is an educator and writer. He teaches language and culture and writes about his thoughts and experiences here.
