Beyond Hope and Despair

“May you abandon hope of all fruition.”

-Tibetan proverb

The human journey is always concerned with action. We have a life, and there’s a constant question about what to do with it. Life can feel like a huge, blank canvas which needs to be filled with things that aren’t currently there. Action is how we fill that space, the stick by which we measure the quality of our life and the quality of the world.

Because something is always going on, there’s persistent concern around how that’s going. Are we enjoying this? Are we doing enough? Is this experience pleasant, satisfying, inspiring? Is it difficult, discouraging, or stressful? Whether we’re making breakfast or a major life decision, there seems to always be some quality of assessment involved. Do I like what’s happening? Am I making the most of this?

This enduring scrutiny of our actions becomes a bit of a tightrope. Everything is conditional, very dependent on our personal criteria of good and bad, success and failure. Life gets very busy with attempting to maintain our criteria, to make sure things happen as we expect or want them to. In a way, it’s a set-up for disappointment. We can either have a fleeting satisfaction, or the sense that things are definitely not okay, not going to plan.

I bring this up because, in addition to our individual lives, there are many things in this world right now that are not okay, which involve us. They are far beyond any sense of acceptability, a clear violation of our expectations of the world. There’s a natural urge to act in response, to do something about what we know is unacceptable. To do nothing would be a contradiction, to imply that we’re okay with what’s happening. But what to do?

Every action we take is an affirmation of the world we feel we are a part of. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are expressing ourselves constantly, painting on the canvas of our life and the life of everything. Each action is a brushstroke, a statement about us. Even if it doesn’t seem that significant, we are always communicating what matters to us, what we value, how we wish to move through the world. It’s not something we can think about too hard (that scrutiny again!), and yet we have to take tremendous responsibility for it. Why? Because our actions are involved in the world we live in right now. We play a shared role in everything we witness.

Behind each action is also the feeling that we have to get somewhere with our activity, whether it’s for ourselves or for others. Usually, our sense of action implies an awareness of a goal: we do something now for the sake of something else in the future. Life is a constant process of moving from one point to the next.

And yet, despite all of our activity, even a brief glance at the world today might suggest that we’re not getting anywhere at all. We’ve never been busier, but for what? Where is it taking us? Are we even aware of where we’re going, or why? Our busyness seems to lack a quality of intention, which often ignores the consequences of how our actions can create a harmful and destabilizing world.

There are many good things we want to accomplish, for our present and for our future. Especially in difficult times, our activity is an attempt to address what we believe isn’t working, creating what we feel isn’t there and should be. We have a sense of “rightness” that we’d like to achieve, and we enthusiastically give our energy towards reaching that. Maybe that “rightness” is expressed by having cleaner water, safer housing, better relationships in our communities. A world without war, without weapons, a place where everyone can live completely and peacefully. These are all important things to work for, and well worth our efforts.

At the same time, these are just ideas. For example, our idea of peace can be quite different from someone else’s. You may want to work together with others to accomplish peace, but someone else may want to kill or hurt people for it. You don’t agree with this, and you have to say something about that. You feel that peace comes without violence; they are convinced that violence is the only way. Ideas of peace begin to fight each other. Very quickly, any chance for real peace disappears. It becomes a big battle over who is more right about what “peace” is. We get absorbed in fighting ideas about peace that we disagree with. Eventually, in the effort to accomplish peace, we stop working for real peace.

This becomes exhausting and discouraging. We had hoped for real peace in the beginning, but despite our actions something doesn’t appear to be working. There is a fear that people don’t want to help each other. No matter how much we do, nothing seems to change. People continue to fight, peace feels farther and farther away. The situation appears hopeless, and we begin to despair.

Hope and despair are very intimate experiences, although we often think very differently about them. Hope suggests being full of action, doing many good things constantly and with great energy. Despair suggests that action is no longer effective or meaningful. We could say that hope describes the presence of action, despair the absence of it.

Hope and despair are related because they represent one idea, one vision of the world. To their credit, they are both conscious of possibility, of things being different. However, they are driven by a single idea: our idea. In our example of peace, our actions for peace are motivated by our definition of that, regardless of whether other people share it. We may agree on this idea with others, but it is still one idea, which as we have seen can come into conflict with other ideas. Despair reflects this singular concept too: if we haven’t accomplished our idea of peace, then peace seems impossible. “The world is ending”, we say. It seems like we have run out of possibilities, and no amount of activity will change that.

Hope and despair share the belief that only one thing can and should happen. Actions are often motivated by a vision for one solution. It’s like going “all-in” on a hand of cards: there’s only one way to win the game, so to speak. The stakes are raised to the highest degree. If we win, then we get everything we hoped for. If we lose, we lose everything.

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I’ve included the proverb above from the Tibetan people because it points to another way of action, a reality beyond a single result. I first encountered it at a time in my life where the stakes of my activity in the world felt very intense and serious. I felt like I needed to make something happen because some state of the world depended on it. When I came across this verse, it stopped me in my tracks. What does this mean, to abandon hope of all fruition? Are the Tibetans asking us to give up, to sit on the sidelines?

Not at all, and the Tibetan people represent a human journey that is far from giving up on themselves or their own situation. From my point of view, they are suggesting the need for real activity, actions that constantly operate in the world of possibility itself. This activity transcends the hope for something specific happening, because that’s only an idea. Who knows if it will come to be? It also refuses to despair, as despair takes us out of action entirely. Real activity is beyond any sense of accomplishment or failure. It is deeply energetic, self-sustaining, and present to reality in its complexity and change.

To use our example of peace again, working for real peace is to abandon the hope of peace as an idea manifesting in the world. It’s like wanting everyone to know what strawberries taste like: but instead of talking about the taste, you have to start growing strawberries and sharing them with others. The difference between describing the taste of strawberries and the actual taste is huge. If you want someone to know what strawberries taste like, you can’t talk or argue with them about it. They have to taste it themselves. We have to get beyond our ideas and embrace the real thing.

Our idea of peace is not real peace, it is only a concept. A utopia is one example of this. A utopia is a positive idea that can lead to good actions, but it is not a reality. A utopia is not something that actually exists in real life. To work for real peace is not to work for the idea of peace. Real peace is much more dynamic than that. Real peace includes the whole world, which is more than one idea and experience. This is what it means to live together, to live in harmony: not a world of people living one idea, but many ideas and experiences working together.

If we confuse our idea of peace with real peace, then we’re looking at only one side of a coin. The idea of peace also implies that there is only non-peace in the world, and we need to replace that non-peace with peace. We will hope and act for peace, while despairing at the experience of non-peace.

This is not the whole situation. Peace and non-peace exist together; there are places in the world that are peaceful and places that are not. To go even further, there are people experiencing non-peace in peaceful places, and vice-versa. It is a very challenging and frustrating situation, but that’s where we need to act. It is not a matter of sitting on the fence, it is about embracing the fullness of reality which is more than one thing.

When the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh was asked about the situation in his home country in the 1960s, he simply said, “Everything is destroyed”. He spent the rest of his life working for real peace in Vietnam and in the world at large. This is an expression of acting beyond hope and despair. Thich Nhat Hanh was not being casual with his words: he really meant it. It wasn’t just the land that was destroyed, it was whole communities, relationships, futures, entire ways of life. Everything was falling apart, yet he did not fall into despair. His life’s work was to embody and communicate the possibility of real peace, present amidst complete destruction.

It is no bad thing to hope: each of us carries a small dream that enables us to continue, to carry-on and contribute to something more. We do this not because it’s a fantasy, but because we have at some point experienced what we know is possible: real peace, real harmony, real community. We know the taste. It’s here in the world and it is our responsibility to nurture that presence.

Perhaps “real hope”, then, is putting our energy into actions without concern for particular results. Maybe we will accomplish everything we want to see, maybe we won’t. Maybe we will learn to exist in greater balance with our natural world, refreshing the air and clearing the water. Maybe we will end all wars everywhere, and live without violence. Maybe we will destroy our planet, and ourselves, completely. Who can say? What may happen doesn’t seem to be the point: what matters is what we are doing right now in this very moment.

To cling to results is, in some ways, one road to despair. They are never quite what we imagine them to be, and the longer they contrast with our ideas about the future, the more dispirited we can become. This is not an invitation to stop showing up, it is an encouragement to act with deeper purpose, without conditions. Attached to our ideas, we are tempted to stop or give up if our actions do not emerge in expected outcomes. Abandoning hope of all fruition, a more enlivened, unshakeable activity becomes possible.

This activity is all around us in nature. Trees, rivers, and mountains do not produce themselves to accomplish something. There is no goal for nature, nature simply acts. There is no rush, only constant rhythm. A flower bud does not ‘hope’ to blossom, it just participates in blossoming. Should something happen, and the blossoming does not come, there is no despair, the world does not end. Flowers continue to bloom regardless. Winter does not arrive to “accomplish winter”, a flowing river is not trying to make something particular happen. There is only action itself. Flowers, winter, and rivers all act in relation with each other, without goal and participating in a shared existence.

Activity is always happening in the natural world, beyond any ideas of hope or despair. There is something oddly beautiful about this. Our love for nature recognizes this boundless quality, and it can provide constant inspiration for our own actions.

Because we are a part of nature, we can act with a similar energy. We can place the fullness of body and mind into creating good things, doing what is needful, taking care of our lives. This wholeness of activity does not ignore what is necessary to look at, and it does not hesitate to show up when asked. Most importantly, it never loses sight of real hope, which is beyond any kind of outcome. It does not seek to create a certain future as much as it lives, right now, what is possible. Rather than despair at what we perceive to be absent, we can act through embodying what we know is absolutely present.

To end this exploration for now, I leave us with the words of the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton, who in his own context echoes this call for enlivened action:

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.” -Thomas Merton, Letter to a Young Activist