Ann Friedman - 10 Ways to Find Hope

I'm ignoring the internet to focus on my book this month, so I’m bringing you AUGLIST: four weeks of lists. These pre-written special editions are built on questions that you asked me to include in the reader survey in April, and I’ve synthesized your more than 3,000 replies. This process is like collage: I read your many answers, trim them and sort them and piece them together, then add a few thoughts of my own.

Today: How do you counter the feeling that "everything is the worst, all the time"? Put another way, What gives you hope?

This question pressed a tender spot. Some of you said that you’re low on hope. You’re struggling. Well, your fellow subscribers have answers for you. It was shocking how consistent they were, and therefore how easy it was for me to sort the replies in 10 categories.

This isn't advice, it's description. It's not what you should do, it's what we already do to tap into a true, deep sense of hope:

1. Connect with ourselves. For hope, we lean on our faith, our therapist, our childhood sense of wonder. Meditation. Religion. Gratitude. We think about our own personal evolution: If we can learn, grow, heal and change in such profound ways, there's hope for other people and systems to do so as well! 


2. Connect with our loved ones. Our people. The people who surround us, they're kind and silly people. Real people in real life communicating about real things. The joy we get from them! We focus on friends and family to see hope. We call our dad. Host a small gathering. Make plans with friends. We hold and are held by them—sometimes literally, mostly metaphorically. We vent to a friend who’s also scared and angry, which makes it more tolerable. We talk to a more optimistic friend, or anyone who is feeling relatively good about their life and choices. Hope is the feeling of a friend standing up for us. Of old friends who meet us right where we are. Of belly laughs while playing Scrabble or Yahtzee. Of building a new friendship with someone we feel safe with. Of telling people what we love about them—and that we see how good their hearts are. Moving through multiple life chapters with our besties helps us take the long view. We’re still here, together. 


3. Connect with humanity. We hunt for hope in packs. We listen to people in our book club, our union, our neighborhood. We pay attention to the good work being done—and join in. This can start as a simple conversation with a stranger. Kindness and caring for one another can carve out a little weird space where folks embrace eccentricity. Other people can really surprise us with radical presence and reciprocity. Solidarity gets shit done. We think more about the helpers, less about the haters. We try to find a local problem and help solve it. Yes, we donate. Yes, we vote. But you know those moments when something trivial more or less universally affects everyone in a community, and everyone breaks out of their own little world and starts checking in with each other? THAT’s where we find hope. Just think about it: Every single response to this question about hope was written by a person doing a favor for a stranger. Someone asked and they wanted to be helpful. People still want to make this world a better place.


4. Hang out with a kid. Behold the world’s capacity for joy at the sight of a new baby! They are too cute not to be hopeful for. Babies learning how to talk and walk. New parents new-parenting. The way our 6-year-old puts us in our place with the blunt force of someone with no inhibitions. Goofing off with our toddler. Walking our kid home in the sunshine. The fetus flip-flopping around inside of us. Our 17-year-old son and his friends. Our students! Their optimism. The light that just seems to emanate from our friends' smart and hilarious kids. We feel compelled to at least fake being hopeful because we brought two kids into this world. We say, I know it’s a cliche. I guess it’s pretty uncool. So corny. But over and over the same answer appears: Kids. They are more than alright. Their enthusiasm for the tiniest things is a microdose of hope. They are growing, so is everything else. We tell our nonbinary kiddo that there has been progress, even if it looks bleak now: "Small moves." Taking them to look for turtles. Teaching them to be kind and grateful. Tucking them into bed at night. It’s all hope. 


5. Hang out with an animal. Hope is furry: Petting our cat. Playing with our perfect rascal of a pup. Watching our dog use his paws to navigate a stick into his mouth. Our foster kittens. We see the joy with which our young, foolish cat greets every new exciting thing, and we try to copy it. Even just following dog rescue accounts! Also those videos where two wildly different animals are best friends. Making relationships with the more-than-human is hopeful. It’s life-changing to care for another life.


6. Remember we have a body. The body is a site of hope. Like, we were cleaning up kid vomit this week and it made us think, “We have bodies, we get to be here. Bodies are gross because they are alive. We are alive.” So yeah, vomit gives us hope. So does getting the endorphins pumping on a bike ride. Dancing. Scream-singing. Thinking about our own mortality. Everything might truly be the worst, but we only get a finite period of time to witness a sunrise, feel rain on our skin, hug our people. Long aimless walks. Good sex. That thing where we lean over in the perfect way and stretch our back and hamstrings and it feels so freaking good. What a gift to get to know this body in this lifetime.


7. Go outside! Hope is sunlit. It is tiny green shoots after a hard cold winter. Tulips. Fresh vegetables. The mountains over the water on a sunny day. The baby squirrel we saw today. This warm breeze blowing across our face. Nature absorbs us. Disappearing into the forest. Listening to the birds. Thinking about the cosmos. Sticking our hands in the earth, even if it’s just a pot on a balcony. Making a habitat in our tiny yard, watching every year as more creatures take refuge there. Seeds still grow and turn into tomatoes even when the world feels like it’s falling apart. The first warm day after a Midwestern winter shows you: The sun always comes back. Fungi. Perennials. The path of totality. Life and the universe are not supposed to be static.


8. Revel in art. Art is a lifeline, a portal, something out of nothing. We read, we read, we read. We sing with a choir—harmony helps. We make jokes and watch other people laugh. We choose a feel-good movie. Honestly, we love high school drama productions. These kids are so freaking talented. We love any performance where the audience is watching, rapt, without any screens visible. Music gives us hope. We’re trying to get more into upbeat music instead of our usual sad folk/country. People are making some goddamn good art out there! Knitting the strands together, getting into drag, improvising through the awkwardness, plucking a guitar, setting words in rows. This is how we process stuff. A reminder that there are no “new” problems. In museums, what has lasted has been art. The ancients all did art. People have always wanted to make beauty.


9. Indulge in a small pleasure. Hope is tiny and mundane. Cooking a meal that is more than the sum of its parts. The public library system. Learning something new. Growing tiny citrus trees in a city apartment! Putting something fun on the to do list. Planning the next holiday. Postcards! Whimsy! A splash of orange water in our green tea. A million small things. All the sparklets and delights.


10. Keep it in perspective. Humans have always felt this way, no matter what time period they have lived in. Everything has always been the worst, and people march on. Just a wobbly path in the right direction with lots of bad diversions. We’re 60 so take it from us: a lot of things are better than they used to be, especially for women. We shift the time horizon. Acknowledge the smallness of everything we know. Human resilience lasts longer than petty dictators. We are part of a larger story of justice and collective liberation. We zoom way out and think about how lucky we are to have the basics. We owe it to our ancestors, who survived so much, to keep hoping and pushing. Nothing stays the same; the good or the bad. There is only now, and it has always contained multitudes. We remind ourselves that, as Mariame Kaba says, hope is a discipline. Hope is a choice. Hope is a verb.