| An Unexpected Lesson in Hope |
| It's odd who our teachers are and from where we derive our lessons in life. Last week I enjoyed an easy if unexpected lesson in the essence of life from a carpenter. | |
 |  | | Pandanus & Moon;Mark Croker |
I was stumbling around on a gravelly block of vacant land adjacent to a colonial-style weatherboard house I was interested in buying. I'd seen a picture of it on the internet and, too impatient to wait until the next open house inspection, was trying to get a good look at it from the outside.
"Oi! You alright?" A rumble from the verandah above my head startled me. I couldn't see the voice's author at first but the rising inflection in his question was friendly. I shifted my position so that I could see the voice behind the question: despite his graying hair, he looked to be this side of forty and peered down at me with a look of expectancy. I announced my purpose and gave my apology at the same time: "Sorry! I'm just sticky-beaking." "No worries! Come on in!" He strode down the stairs towards me with athletic enthusiasm, his right hand extended in welcome. I shook his hand in reply, and apologized again. This was trigger enough for him to greet me like a long lost sister. He chatted away to me, completely undeterred by our ignorance of each other. The fact that we were strangers didn't matter a whit to him. His cheerfulness was infectious. I found myself at first smiling, and then laughing in tune to his running commentary on the house, which he punctuated with the occasional "do you like it?" gesturing to this new feature and that rebuilt structure.
After several minutes of this, I grew bold and said "you seem to enjoy what you do." This unleashed a new volley of commentary, this time on the purpose of life which he ended by saying "My finances aren't as sure as they used to be. I used to have a regular fortnightly paycheck from Telecom but now I've got to live by my wits, but you know what?" I shook my head. He cried out "I feel alive!" He sounded triumphant. I saw that his face was free of guile. He looked and sounded like a man who'd discovered the joy of living in the present. And for some reason, that gave me hope. I left my meeting with this carpenter, a man I will not see again, feeling a sense of renewal. It may have only been brief, this sense of renewal, but sometimes such moments are enough to carry you through to the next round of life's ups and downs.
I have been thinking a lot about hope lately. I worry about hope. Sometimes, I feel that it has gone missing in action.
Faith, hope and charity: these were the three virtues of my catechism as a child. They seem extraordinarily adult and complex concepts with which to burden a child, but I am pleased now to have been taught them back then, because how or where would I learn such things now? They don't seem to be part of our day-to-day grammar anymore. Perhaps they never really were.
They are certainly missing from our political landscape. Why doesn't Prime Minister Howard warn us to "Be alert to hope but not alarmed by setbacks," or extend his charity to announce "We welcome all people in this country, including the terrified, the war-damaged and the poor," or signal his belief in the impossible by describing his dreams as "Let us strive for a world in which peace is wrought through the power of peaceful actions." Instead he, along with the major leaders of our western democracies, is intent in his mission to brew fear, a malignancy designed to corrode the hopes of even the most robust people.
G.K. Chesterton described hope as "the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate." He said that "hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all." These sound like true if not particularly explanatory statements.
He also claimed that the "virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse." I don't want to agree with him. It's true that each day I read stories in the newspapers about people who are reeling from the shock of devastation wrought by bushfire, floods or drought but who can still say "we'll be right mate, we'll get by." This is clearly the voice of hope, if not good-humoured grace under pressure. But I also read about and see all around me people who endure lives of pervasive struggle and deprivation. Just this morning, for example, I read about new research which suggests that a period of unrivalled prosperity in Australia has coincided with an alarming rise in poverty. Apparently, the number of working Australians who make less than two-thirds of median earnings - $533 a week or $27,716 a year - has risen from 1.2 million to 1.8 million, a rise of 50 percent in about a decade.
How do these people get by? What sustains them? How do they remain sufficiently buoyant not to throw in the towel? Anne Deveson might ascribe it to resilience, but as she acknowledges, "negativity fills the mind with doubt and makes resilience near impossible." What is the magic ingredient, then, that prevents people from succumbing to negativity and doubt? I like to think it's the quality of hope, even if it no longer goes by that name, even if the word itself is disappearing from our lexicon. Can qualities still exist in the absence of their being named? Mary Zournazi, author of "Hope: New Philosophies for Change" believes hope to be "a basic human condition, one that involves a belief and trust in the world." So perhaps hope goes by other names these days, and still works its magic all the while.
But that still leaves me with the unanswered question: What's the role of government in fanning the flames of hope for us all? Is it solely a personal responsibility or a task for families and communities? Or does hope's vitality fall within the exclusive domain of the church, in all its representations?
. . .
Nowadays, I like to imagine my soul as looking like a piece of honeycomb. I renew myself by feeding my imagined small honeycomb gaps of the soul with the random nutrients of hope's renewal, like my conversation with the carpenter.
The process of feeding my soul in this way feels easier than the usual exhortation to live a "balanced life" in the quest for a measure of serenity, if not happiness. Despite my girlhood roller-skating skills, I've never demonstrated much capacity for physical balance. My centre of gravity doesn't seem to sit in the right place. Similarly, I haven't yet learnt the mental or emotional lightness of balanced grace to easily shrug off the occasional setback against the joys of life in general. In any case, the whole idea of balance seems to be fraught with the tensions of calibration, measurement, and calculation. I'm not sure that I like the idea of approaching my life as an algorithm. If E=mc2, what's the formula that combines B (for balance) with a quantity of w/l (for work/life) to equal H2 (for happiness squared infinitely)?
No, the attentive quality of hope seems to be a more rewarding way to navigate my way through life. Finding hope in my life is like having ballast in my soul. It helps to balance me, keeps me steady. I might still take on too much water from time to time, in the shape of fears, tears and self-doubt, but I'm learning now how to sheet that excess water away from me. By reminding myself to look to the power of hope, I can regain that necessary stillness of soul to steer a steady course through my days and my nights.
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