photo by robotskirts via flickr

Every four years, as potential presidents vie for the support of the electorate, we hear a lot about hope. Candidates wax rhapsodic about it for days on end, and we eat it up with a spoon and a cherry on top.

It’s not surprising. In an increasingly insecure world, hope gives us something to hold on to. We might not be able to see very far into the future, but we can at least hope that it will be good, which makes us feel a little better.

This, of course, is a necessary thing. God only knows where humanity would be if we didn’t have this capacity. In our darkest times, hope keeps us going.

My problem with hope is that, on its own, it’s inherently passive—nice and warm and fluffy, but ineffectual. If we were sitting inside a burning house, hope would have us looking round at each other and saying “I hope the firefighters get here soon” when we could be gathering up the children and pets and getting ourselves out of danger.

Even worse is when hope is an enabler, when it gets pinned like a pathetic little tail on the donkey of postmodern cynicism. When we look at life through a fundamentally pessimistic lens, we are magically relieved of our responsibility to change anything.

Meanwhile, as we bitch and moan about the sad state of things, the state of things gets ever sadder. So do we—cynicism begets more cynicism. And our small allotments of hope just encourage us to wait, blindly, for something better to come along.

One recent example of this dynamic: The Secret. Millions of people saw and read it, hoped for things, then sat on their arses waiting for those things to materialize out of thin air. But—seriously—has anything ever materialized out of thin air? Has any desire come true with absolutely no action on the desirer’s part? Do we really believe that Santa Claus is going to give us everything we hope for, even if Mom and Dad are broke?

This hope-and-wait act is so childish, so rife with dodgy thinking about how things work, it’s no wonder we are cynical.

And what are we waiting for anyway? Who’s going to save us? The government? Global free markets? Barack Obama? Maybe. But in the meantime, we risk a LOT by sitting still. In fact, we risk everything.

We at The Sunny Way hereby propose that all such flaccid waiting and hoping come to a full and complete stop right now. We’d like to add the concepts of action and responsibility to the mix.

Instead of using hope as a band-aid to soothe the sad cockles of our cynical hearts, let’s allow it to illuminate possibilities. Instead of vague optimistic platitudes, let’s make our hopes specific. Let’s imagine a future we can be hopeful about, then actually take responsibility for making it reality.

Hope is a gift, but if we are to succeed, it must be the star we navigate by, not the drink we drown our sorrows in.