Hope in the Dark

"Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement, pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It's the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone."

Rebecca Solnit

Hope in the Dark

"The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing a future can be, I think."

Virginia Woolf

I sometimes feel overwhelmed. I feel that things are far from what they should be, and it sometimes seems that no matter how hard we fight, we will never get to the place where we should. Things sometimes feel desperate; sometimes it feels like we've barely made a step forward, only to be forced two or three steps back. I sometimes feel this way with a lot of things: women's rights, health care, living wages and affordable housing, war, climate change. Its often frustrating, often overwhelming. 

In the book, Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit addresses this question of why we should hope, especially when the problems that we need to solve seem insurmountable. She discusses why hope is valuable and necessary, especially when problems seem to be at their worst, and reminds us that things are never as dark as they seem. Often things are better than they were yesterday, and change is often extremely slow.

She also talks about many of the important and under reported movements lead by activists around the world and examines why they are often successful, even when they did not 'win' the day, and why they aren't talked about much in the United States.

Solnit (author of Men Explain Things to Me, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and the Faraway Nearby) does all of this with masterful prose and beautiful composition. Her language pulls the reader through the book, covering a multitude of subjects (with occasional footnotes for the necessary backstory), and ties the book together extremely well. 

This book is a must read for everyone. It shows us that our actions will always make a difference, even when the world is to dark to wade through, and sometimes acting when there is no light at the end of the tunnel is the bravest thing we can do.