On practicing hope as a form of resistance
There is a particular stretch of pavement near the old chapel I often walk past on Sunday evenings—its surface cracked and weather-worn, patched over time with tar and good intentions. And in one of those stubborn little fissures, just beside a drainpipe, a wildflower has taken root. I do not know its name, only that it blooms defiantly, as if the world were not unraveling just a little further each day.
I have come to look for it now, like an old friend. It reminds me, in its small way, that hope is not the absence of difficulty, but the presence of defiance.
You see, the temptation at the end of any honest reckoning with the world is weariness. When one has spent time considering rising seas and fragmented communities, machine minds and scorched forests, it is easy to slip into that subtle form of despair we call resignation. It is not melodramatic. It wears a sensible coat. It merely shrugs and says, “Well, that’s how things are now.”
But resignation, I’m afraid, is a poor gardener. It grows nothing but thorns.
Hope, by contrast, is wildly generative. And in our time—perhaps in every time—it must be practiced not merely as a sentiment, but as a form of resistance.
This does not mean loud protests or slogans painted across brick. (Though it may, for some, involve those.) I mean a subtler kind of resistance—the sort that begins at the level of attention.
In a culture built on distraction, to pay deep attention is a rebellious act. To look long at something—be it a person, a pain, or a wildflower in the concrete—is to say, “You matter. I will not scroll past you.” This kind of attention is the first tilling of hope’s soil.
And then comes the planting.
Not of certainty, mind you, but of seeds. Small acts, tenderly undertaken, with no guarantee of harvest. A weekly letter to an elderly neighbour. A book passed to a child. A conversation across difference that refuses to calcify into argument. A plot of land tended with reverence. A song sung into the silence.
These are the seeds that crack despair’s concrete.
But perhaps the most radical seed we can plant today is imagination. In an age that profits from cynicism and monetises fear, to imagine a different world is a kind of holy foolishness. But oh, how we need fools who can still imagine! Imagine communities that truly include. Economies that protect the vulnerable. Technologies that serve the soul. Faiths that make room at the table, even for the doubters.
To imagine is not to escape—it is to excavate. To dig beneath what is to glimpse what could yet be.
Of course, hope as resistance will not always feel noble. It will often feel ordinary. The curators of hope in my own life are rarely saints or sages. They are the ones who keep turning up. Who laugh often. Who cry freely. Who offer their presence, their food, their questions. Who leave the world a little softer than they found it.
One of them—an elderly chaplain I once knew—kept a garden behind the hospital where he served. It was small, mostly herbs and tomatoes. But he always said, “I plant it every spring because the world is dying, and someone ought to remind it how to live.” He died some years ago. But the rosemary still grows.
And so, as this little series comes to a close, I leave you with this: Hope is not a mood. It is not a vague feeling that things will turn out all right. Hope is something you practice, quite deliberately, in the face of everything that tells you not to.
Hope is a hand extended, a candle lit, a truth spoken kindly. It is the refusal to let cynicism have the last word. It is the steady decision to be human, fully and freely, in a world that often forgets how.
It is, above all, the planting of seeds. Some of them will die. But some—by grace, grit, and sunlight—will grow.
Choose one seed to plant.
Perhaps it is a commitment to gather a few neighbours each month around a shared meal. Perhaps it is a letter to a policymaker. Perhaps it is a morning walk, taken in silence, as a ritual of grounding. Perhaps it is a vow to tell the truth—with gentleness, but without apology.
Whatever it is, let it be rooted in the belief that this world, though battered, is still beloved.
And you, dear reader, are part of its renewal.
Keep planting. The cracks are already opening.
