I’m going to get a haircut on Friday, and to have a take-away coffee and a walk tomorrow with a girlfriend.
School kids ran down the street for their triumphal return to class this morning, and the sun was out, and warm.
As lockdown slowly begins to abate, I can feel a tide rising. A deep, powerful ebb, gathering itself on the horizon.
It’s joy, and a wave of creativity that’s building. I can already feel the spray starting to gently rinse away the heavy grime of the last year, the grief and anxiety, all the inertia.
These moments of hope, the warm currents that wrap themselves around you in a cold, hard surf — they’re too precious to ignore.
Don’t let the cynics splash salt in your eyes, crying that everything good will be taken away just after being given. Immerse yourself these moments, because they sustain you.
Hope is a relief. Even just a few moments to breathe in its possibility can refresh you and keep you going for a long, long time.
To hope, we have to trust the moment and allow ourselves to risk disappointment. After the year we’ve had, that feels a bigger risk than normal.
But our hope contains all our joy and creativity, and so we have to bridge that fear. As hope begins to rise around you, remember that the page is always there, ready to hold your fears, so that you don’t have to.
Unlike us, the page will always absorb the cynicism and snark and naysaying, without being poisoned by it, or strangled by sadness. The page can bear the raw resistance of people in pain, with a strength most of us can’t muster just now.
So if you can hear the roar of hope in the distance, but the receding tide has revealed an array of fears and pain, put it on the page. Leave it there for today, so that you can enjoy what’s coming.