Hope in Uncertainty

Looking to control something in these uncontrollable times?  Grab onto some hope and see what you can do with it.

From author Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities:

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone…”

YoungJoni_TRP_Summer_2017_0029
Photographs of Young Joni Restaurant in Minneapolis, MN. All images by Eliesa Johnson and The Restaurant Project.

Much gratitude to Michelle Nordhougen of Growing Edge Facilitation for sharing this quote with me!

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