17. Small but gutsy
We are a species in terrible danger. Hard times are ahead for us. We’re going to be tested, and tested severely.
To prepare ourselves, we need to develop an inner strength robust enough and resilient enough to see us through what’s coming. And aren’t things bad enough already that we need that now?
Moral fight is the best source of strength I know. So throughout Part Four, I’m going to give you fight stories, lots of them, some in the form of dialogues so you can see the back and forth of the relationships I’m illustrating.
Why not give you how-tos instead? Because how-tos keep us at arm’s length. Stories take us inside. They provide a richer experience because they’re alive with personality, nuance, and layers of meaning. They incarnate fight, they make it flesh and blood, while how-tos only provide a skeletal sketch.
But given the magnitude of the crisis we’re in, let me warn you that my stories, taken one by one, might seem too small.
And they are small. I don’t know what to do about global conflicts. I don’t know how to motivate a whole nation to change its ways. I don’t know how to get a mass population to take love to the next level. So I focus on what I can do.
My stories are small, but they’re doable. You can’t save the world with them, but you can make a life out of them.
My stories are small, but what powers them is not, because moral fight is the gutsiest element in the universe. It’s the one thing we’ve got that gives us the ability to oppose our operating system. And to oppose evolution which gave us that system. And to oppose the universe which gave us evolution.
So not only does our moral fight give us the ability to take a stand against our fate, it gives us the moxie to take a stand against the universe itself.
I find it breathtaking to think that we humans, we little bits of protoplasm, might be the only creatures in all the vastness of the cosmos who have this power. And realizing this gives me a shot of attitude: Let’s take this singular moral fight that’s in us and use the hell out of it.
And what can we do with it? Put it into the heart of our love. Then put that fighting kind of love into the heart of our relationships. And right there is the foundation for a post-hope life worth living. A life of ambition, not resignation.
What’s the provenance of my stories? Those I tell about myself I’m recounting just as they happened. Stories about others, though, follow a different trajectory. They started with real people and real events, but as I wrote them out, I changed details, often every single detail—the fiction writer in me took over. At first this was to protect identities. Especially for the nonprofit leaders I talk about. In their communities, they’re so much in the spotlight and under the microscope they need a special degree of confidentiality.
Then I noticed the freedom to invent was helping me go deeper into what I wanted to show you. You know how fiction sometimes captures truth better than nonfiction? That’s what I was experiencing, so I kept inventing. But still, every story I tell is absolutely true to the reality of moral fight.
And one more caveat. The older I get, the more I understand how little one person can know. It’s not that I don’t stand by what I’ve written here. It’s so much me I can’t not. But at the same time, I’m just me and I’m only living my one little life and the world is so big.
There are experts who claim they’ve got all the answers. That’s definitely not me. The post-hope world is so complex and wrenching, I don’t see how anyone could possibly master it. I haven’t and I wouldn’t believe anyone who said they had. And I wouldn’t listen to anyone insisting on a single set of how-tos they think everyone should follow.
What we need, those of us who end up here on the far side, is not experts or gurus or preachers of gospels. We need each other.
This is a potluck place, not an expert place. But in our post-hope potluck, instead of bringing random dishes to share, we’re bringing our whole selves, as tenderly and fiercely as we can. We’re sharing our best fight stories to help each other deal with the danger we find ourselves in.
And this brings me to a favor I’d like to ask of you, whether you’re new to the far side of hope or whether you crossed over long ago and have been settled in for years. To ask it, though, I need to say something first about love stories. I’ve seen dozens on TV and in the movies and I’ve read bunches more in novels. But I’m always eager for the next one as long as it’s fresh and surprising and messy with personality, as opposed to yet another tired Hollywood template with one-dimensional people plodding through it.
I want to see characters rich with idiosyncrasy who ignite their own special chemistry that only the two of them can ignite together. Because whenever two people take the journey to love, struggling through all the obstacles that real humans come up against along the way, I’m interested. It doesn’t matter how different they are from me, I want to learn from them, I want to discover what they’re discovering, I want to understand love in ways I haven’t before.
I feel the same about post-hope stories. There’s so much more to this territory than what, despite my years here, I’ve been able to experience. There’s so much more I want to learn than what I can learn on my own. So I want to ask you to join the potluck.
No matter how much your moral fight has in common with anyone else’s, still your fight is yours. It’s shaped by your personality, your life experiences, and your imagination. Please let these final chapters of mine provoke your thinking about your own unique discoveries and what you want to say to the world.
Then, when you’re ready, share your stories. How hard was it to leave hope behind? What was it like crossing over? What did it take to settle into this strange new neighborhood? What are you learning about yourself? What risks are you taking? What boundaries are you pushing? How are you moving your relationships forward? How are you asking more of love? How are you making a home for yourself here?
And please don’t hold back. Give us details, lots of details. Give us nuance, give us layers. Take us into your real depth, because then your story, being so much you, might just become very important to the rest of us.
As conditions worsen, as it becomes harder to hold onto hope, more and more people will be crossing over to the far side, landing here scared and disoriented. Those of us who are veterans of this place, now get to do something special, something I’ve come to love very much. We get to welcome these new folks in. We get to give them comforting and company. We get to help them find their fighting spirit. We get to show them by our own example that there is life after the death of hope, and it can be good.
In fact, it might be better than what went before. That’s how it is for me. I’m happier now than I’ve ever been, though I’m carrying far more sorrow in me than I ever have, or ever thought I could carry.
There’s a utility to the fight in us because there are so many useful things we can do with it. But then there’s something more.
It’s got grace. I talk sometimes about the part of me that always loves me enough to fight for me, and I’ve become very fond of it, and I call on it every day. But it’s not something I devised on purpose or by plan. It came on its own. It surprised me. So it feels like a gift, it feels like grace.
And the same with moral fight. My nickname for it is the twist of grace, because evolution gave us the possibility of this fight by accident. As if it were a gift. Then it was up to us to develop it.
So the way I see it, grace powers our moral labor. Even though that labor costs us sweat and tears and struggle, it’s born of grace, so the blessings it brings feel like they’re infused with grace.
And that includes, most especially, love with fight in its heart. This blessing is my favorite because it’s transformed me.
And it’s my favorite, too, because of all the things I’ve ever experienced in my life, this sweet, ferocious love is what I find most beautiful.
