Lost and still walking

Hope, despair, and apologies to anyone looking for easy answers.

Putting this little preface right up front today, because it’s important:

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It’s Monday morning when a co-worker tells me about a recent exchange with a fellow colleague. They’ve been talking about hope and despair, and about how their perceptions of the two shape certain ideas. Before she and I can go deeper, we’re pulled away by the day’s demands, but the moment lingers, tugging at the hem of my conscience.

By Thursday, the conversation is still echoing when an email arrives that is uncannily in tune. A friend from an entirely different corner of my life writes, “As you ponder subjects in the days and weeks ahead, there are two words that battle in my mind so very often, today in an extreme way. The words are hope and despair.”

I’m 62. I’ve watched terrorism unfold, marched in protests, voted through cynicism, and buried friends too soon. But I’ve never been so clearly invited to reckon with the deepest tension of our time.

Edvard Munch, Despair - Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I begin, reluctantly, with despair. I am good at not dwelling here. I’m skilled at compartmentalizing, at shielding myself from the plague of human malevolence, the endless violence, the visceral disdain, the sharp-tongued noise of a world where everyone is angry and no one remembers how to listen, where suffering hangs in curtains of unspoken consequence. Facing it all means feeling it all, and some days—many days—I’m not sure I can bear that. I retreat into distraction, cling to my routines, train myself to see beyond.

How do I dare to hope when it feels like nothing will ever change? The question presses into the soft body of my sensitivity, insistent and invasive. It finds me in the headlines, in conversations with my children, in the eyes of those failed, again, by systems meant to protect them.

How do I face the pain in the world without letting it break me? How do I stay present to it and still keep going? I have no answers. But maybe it begins with not hurrying past the grief, with allowing myself to mourn what’s broken while choosing to move forward anyway. Not because I know things will get better, but because giving up pretends I already know they won’t. I don’t. I don’t know that. I can’t predict the future.

This, for me, is how hope emerges, or reemerges.

In Christian theology, hope is one of the three theological virtues, along with faith and love. It’s not a mood, or a strategy, or a coping mechanism. It is a habit of the soul—a kind of spiritual muscle memory. Thomas Aquinas considered hope to be both an emotional and a rational act of the will, each directing us toward a future good that is difficult but not unattainable. Despair, by contrast, is a vice, a deliberate refusal to believe in that possibility. Harsh? Maybe. But Aquinas wasn’t in the business of coddling.

While Christianity treats hope as a divine virtue, existentialists grapple with it from a different starting point. Søren Kierkegaard and Albert Camus weren’t interested in eternal rewards. For them, despair was the price of self-awareness. Camus saw life as absurd—our hunger for meaning colliding with a silent universe. Yet he insisted that even Sisyphus, endlessly pushing his boulder uphill, could find dignity in the struggle. Hope, for him, was not optimism. It was defiance.

I can feel both at once: disoriented and determined, lost and still walking.

Kierkegaard, on the other hand, saw despair as the unavoidable furnace we walk through on the way to becoming ourselves, something to be endured rather than eliminated. In that sense, despair isn’t the opposite of hope—it’s the terrain hope has to travel to get where it’s going.

Modern psychology offers another lens. According to positive psychologist C.R. Snyder, hope is believing I can create pathways toward my goals and stay motivated to pursue them. It’s like having a built-in GPS, constantly rerouting when obstacles show up. Despair, then, is what happens when the map disappears or the destination fades out of view. But this isn’t a binary system. I can feel both at once: disoriented and determined, lost and still walking.

It’s now Saturday and I’ve descended the steps of a newly restored ice house on a historic property. The space is dim, lit only by the light drifting down from the now open door, and it is markedly cooler here than the air I just walked away from. Here, some 10 feet below ground, is a young pokeweed plant. Pale from lack of sunlight but as thick as bone, it grows despite the inhospitable environment, surging upward through gravel that covers the floor.

Maybe hope and despair aren’t opposing forces. Maybe they’re more like those cranky couples who argue constantly but can’t live without each other. Hope doesn’t cancel despair. Sometimes, it emerges right in the middle of it—unexpected and impossible to ignore, a green shoot in stone.

To hope is to give yourself to the future—and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

Maybe the key isn’t to present hope as an answer, but as a opening—to companionship, to courage, to continuing.

In Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit puts it this way: “...[I]t will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future—and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”

So where does that leave us?

Maybe it leaves us in the dark, looking for the light. Not pretending it’s easy, not denying the depths of sorrow, but still reaching for something anyway. That plant in the ice house? It didn’t wait for perfect conditions. It just grew.

Maybe that’s all we can do. Grow anyway. Rise, even here. Not because light is certain, but because reaching for it is what keeps us alive.

~Elizabeth

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