How do you hold on to hope?
Don’t you give up?
Where do you get your strength?
These are wonderings and questions I meet rather often and mainly reflect the heavy, despairing and hopeless mindset of many around me. This article is my detailed response.
Let me begin with a tale:
One day a huge fire broke out in the forest. Animals ran scared to the river bank, where they stood and watched the fire decimate their former living space. Murmurs of desperation, hopelessness, and cries (or growls or sobs) filled the air. All of them, except the Honeyeater. This bird dived into the river, collected several drops of water in its beak and flew over to the forest where it dropped water on the fire. Thus, again and again.
You’re too small, it won’t help, you’re endangering yourself, watch your wings you stupid bird! Said these and the other animals. One of them roared at the bird: What the hell are you doing?!
The sunbird answered: Whatever I can, and flew back to the river to collect drops of water.
Several years ago, I familiarized myself with the work of Joanna Macy – a peace, justice and ecology activist for the past 60 years. Macy believes in one’s freedom to choose how to respond in every situation. She explains that facing incredible challenges, we think we have no choice, or that every action we take will have no effect, that aspiration to change the existing order.
Macy distinguishes between passive and active action:
The first is to wait for something external to change in order to generate change, when conditions are ripe. Only then, when chances for change become stronger, we shall act. In such situations, the loss of hope is paralyzing.
The second is the active one, based on passion and purpose, translated into steps in the right direction. This is the practice:
First, to look at reality and study it with wide open eyes. Pay attention to what we see and how we feel about it.
At this point we must define our intention in respect of the values we wish to express, the reality we aspire, giving our intention a direction. A destination. A target.
Finally, take steps towards it. Act.
Active hope does not need optimism. Its driving force is one’s intention. We choose to act, focusing on our intention and letting it carry us, even when the object of our hope seems too far and unobtainable. Intention can be independent. Feelings such as anger or frustration, those feelings urging action, are the fire necessary to feed passion and the choice of active hope.
What has The Daily File to do with all of this? It is my active hope.
A created it about 3.5 years ago, no precise date of birth. It was preceded by a period of frustration and inner urge to change the oppressive reality in the West Bank. Values such as human dignity and freedom, humaneness – these are the values I wished to express.
Restlessness was the fuel that drove me to come out and study, experience first-hand and look at reality, look for sources of information, awake and sober up.
The sensation was of unravelling at once all the myths I had grown up with. This is known in the literature as ‘the great unravelling’. An uneasy sensation of confusion, sadness and instability.
The intention – as I wished to scream it in public – was ‘Wake up!!!’
Then came the Umm Al Fahm demonstration of February 2021, where the police so violently attacked a non-violent protest of its helplessness in treating the increasing crime in the 1948 Palestinian society (citizens inside the State of Israel).
With my cell-phone camera and little skill in Facebook Live, I documented the attack against the protesters. One can hear my own shock at the police’s brutality. This documentation ran viral. After I rid myself of the stench that stuck, I realized the power of documentation and sharing in social media. My own “bird beak” was my writing. I realized that my privileged voice as a Jewish Israeli can be a conduit for those whose voice is silenced, oppressed. The Daily File was in fact the practical, systematic and ‘woke’ substitute for that first ‘live’.
Over the years it changed form. Became efficient with the help of people who share my beliefs, and became a daily exercise in active hope, even when optimism was very very distant. I wanted it. I read, categorized, validated, was flooded, discouraged, choosing anew, reading, collecting, sharing, being flooded, discouraged, re-choosing. Again and again. Drops of water – data and news – knocking on the gates of intended ignorance or denial. Again and again.
My journey was and still is intense. The practice of active hope might be (even commendably so) in small doses, in possible pulses. But it needs consistency, Sisyphean action, intentional. This is not a one-time heroic deed.
Finally, I have been told more than once that desperation is no option. My answer is that it is definitely an option. But not a plan of action. I choose humaneness anew every day. I choose to act in order to re-humanize every day anew. Every activist is called one for it is their choice – turning their hope into another, active society.
Link to Joanna Macy’s website: www.joannamacy.net
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