Hope, Fear, Anxiety, and Lament
Introductory Series Post #2
Before we talk anymore about hope we must talk about fear, anxiety, sorrow, grief, and lament. When the specter and the reality of climate impacts floods our hearts and minds with fear we can feel anxiety. When there is loss, when we are touched by climate darkness, there is sorrow and grief. And from grief there can come lament.
We experience climate consequences and we know such loss did not have to be. We know the fault lies with humanity. We anxiously peer into the unknown future and know that more darkness will come.
The truth is, when we look climate reality squarely in the face, fear and anxiety are natural reactions, and there is a deep cause for lament. If we are not careful, anxiety, sorrow, grief, and lament can turn into despair, which in turn can become a downward spiral that has us giving up on climate action. In such cases despair from anxiety and grief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But all fear, anxiety, sorrow, grief, and lament do not have to become despair. They can give rise to hope.
Not in some cheap, pollyannish way. This is not cheap hope. Nothing from fear, anxiety, loss, sorrow, grief, and lament is cheap.
To forestall or overcome anxiety, fear must be challenged and channeled right away into action. We must let others help us with this. Together, we do not deny our fear; we use it to fuel action that produces hope.
Some of the costly hope we find in the climate action space comes out of grief and lament; some of our hope sits alongside, walks alongside lament, and if and when the time is right, puts its arms around lament.
Sometimes lament cannot be comforted, and our hope must let it be. In such instances our hope must be quiet and maintain a respectful distance.
In contrast to the quick action we must take to face down fear, we must give grief space and time. But in such vigils hope must never abandon grief and lament. In such vigils hope must be quiet. Hope must wait. And hope must guard against despair.
We must not let despair create a dystopic future bereft of all hope, a future where today’s darkness steals hope and makes a darker future that need not have been.
But is hope simply whistling past the graveyard? Happy talk as we sleepwalk our way to our doom?
Real hope does not deny our climate reality or our political reality. It is fantasy that does that. That’s a key difference between hope and fantasy.
Fantasy is not automatically a bad thing. It can offer us a cathartic break from reality. But if it stops us from facing our reality and doing something about our circumstances, it has become a hindrance to making hope happen. Then we really are sleepwalking our way through the darkness.
In contrast, real hope cannot exist without its feet planted firmly in reality. For if we do not see our situation for what it is, we cannot then see what needs changing. And it is that seeing that is the beginnings of real hope. To see reality, including the dangers and opposition we face, is integral to hope. It spurs us to envision a different reality and to act to make it happen, to turn hope into reality, action-hope that faces down fear and anxiety and turns them into fuel for more action and more hope. Fantasy leads to none of this, and can become a barrier to hope, like a drug that becomes an addiction.
In contrast to hope, it is fantasy that knows not lament, that pretends fear and anxiety and sorrow do not exist, even if they give rise to fantasy. Fantasy pretends that it comes into being ex nihilo, out of nothing.
Those who seek for hope can find in fear, anxiety, sorrow, grief, and lament the seeds of hope’s renewal. Out of them can come real hope. Only when we recognize and acknowledge the real causes of our fear, anxiety, and lament can we begin to imagine how to overcome them and the need, the imperative, to do so. And in seeing how to overcome, we see the path of hope. The cause of these potentially paralyzing emotions, the consequences of climate change and the coming calamity if we do not act, can help us see a cause greater than ourselves, something worth fighting for together. And from action, from joining together with others in common cause, we find hope.
Thus, from fear, anxiety, and lament can come hope.
This does not happen automatically. As I said, they can lead to despair. We must choose to see hope, we must help each other see, and then we must decide to make hope happen.
Together we must choose to see; together we must decide to do; together we must make hope happen, our future come faster, and our world more beautiful.
But there are those who are arrayed against our creating hope.
We must be mindful of the fact that our struggle is not with those who describe the reality of the climate threat, but rather with those who are prematurely telling us it is too late, that our actions won’t matter and therefore don’t matter. We struggle against those with dystopic visions who say our fate is sealed.
Our struggle is also with those who deny the reality of the climate threat, for hope cannot come from denial.
True denial is its own demented fantasy, an ideological fugue state feeding upon itself.
Bogus denial is someone who knows the threat is real but cynically and selfishly says otherwise out of greed or pride or both. Whether it is bogus or true denial matters not. Both are enemies of hope.
Hope must give birth to action to bring about what we hope for. Hope’s children are the actions that make hope real, that make hope come alive, that make hope happen.
Thus, hope must be grounded in reality and give rise to action. Hope’s enemies — dystoipic fatalism, pretend-hope or harmful fantasies, denial, and despair — can only be overcome by recognizing our reality and working to change things in keeping with hope.
That is why what I offer is realistic hope, grounded both in the threat, and in our potential to overcome the threat.
If climate harm has touched your life, if fear and anxiety threaten you with paralysis, if climate politics and policy set-backs have led you to the brink of despair, I invite you to join us as we beat back the darkness and find our way into the light. In more ways than one, we are children of the light.
Make sure to check out the other posts in this Introductory Series.