There are days—many now—when the world feels like it is fraying at the seams. The news arrives like winter storms, one upon another: the heat is rising, the oceans swelling, and the earth groans beneath the weight of its cleverest tenant. Democracy flickers in the hands of weary protestors. And yet somewhere, someone still plants a tree.
Hope, I’ve come to believe, is not the bright, buoyant thing it is often advertised to be. It is not naïve. It is not blind. It does not dress itself in the garish colours of false cheer. No, true hope is a quieter thing—bone-deep and stubborn. It survives in the shadowed places. It takes root in grief and chooses, still, to grow.
We are not well, we humans, not as a whole. And yet we are not beyond mending. That is the paradox. We teeter on the brink, and yet the spirit—this mad, radiant thing inside us—still seeks beauty, still yearns for justice, still whispers to us, even in our darkest hours: there is more than this.
When people gather to demand their dignity, when scientists risk failure for the sake of the stars, when neighbours shelter one another from fire or flood, we see it: not hope as sentiment, but hope as solidarity. As resistance. As a sacrament.
Hope is the bridge between the already and the not-yet. It does not require certainty, only faithfulness. It insists that what we do matters, even if we will not live to see the fruit. In this way, hope is deeply communal. It binds us to one another—not in abstraction, but in shared labor. Shared lament. Shared imagining.
The headlines may tell us that the temperature will soon break all records. That the institutions we trusted falter. That those in power forget. But hope—the real, slow-burning kind—reminds us that the human spirit is not only capable of great ruin, but also of great repair.
So we must guard it, this hope. Not with slogans or with sentiment, but with action. With art. With protest and prayer and public service. With the long work of building what we cannot finish, but what others might one day inherit.
Because if we lose hope, we lose the thread. And if we lose the thread, we lose each other.
Let us not.
