7. Fight
For two weeks in August twenty years ago I thought I was dying. Here’s how that mistake happened. I went to my doctor to show him a scattering of salmon-colored patches on my back thinking it was some dumb rash. He grabbed his biopsy kit, took two bites, gave me the number of a specialist and had nothing else to say, so good-bye.
Five days later, I went to see Dr. Z. at the university center up on the hill. He told me I had a rare skin cancer, snipped three more samples, and scheduled me to return in two weeks. I was too shaken to ask questions.
Back out on the street in the sunshine, I told myself, “A good patient reads up on his illness.” Just up the block was a world-class medical bookstore, and next to it a world-class medical library, so off I went. In the store, I cracked open a hefty clinical book. A new-car smell came out at me. I checked the index and started reading about my cancer. Messed-up CD8 cells infuse into the epidermis, thus the patches. Not too scary. But if those cells go back inside and get into your bloodstream they turn into lymphoma. Okay, so this stuff’s dangerous. Then when I got down to the end, the last sentence said, “invariably fatal.” I rushed to the library hoping for rescue, telling myself to only look at current books from the last two years. I grabbed them off the shelf one after the other and sped-read down to where each of them concluded with a grim prognosis.
It was a slow death, five to fifteen years, so that was something, but what a death. Ugly red lesions would break out on my face. There were pictures, lots of pictures. That’s when I felt sick. I was such a private person, if I was going to have to die, why couldn’t I do it modestly with an invisible inside cancer instead of this brazen thing that would make a scene?
I drove home crying, called my friend Kate crying, called my sister and my parents crying. I was scared, but maybe angry even more than scared. I had stopped doing my maniacal activism. I had decided I was going to have a personal life and be happy. I had decided it was my turn. But the cancer said: “You don’t get a turn.”
It was a hard two weeks. Everything was so intense. The blue of the sky had never been so blue. The days passed in slow motion. I got lost inside each moment, yet each one flashed by at lightning speed.
When I went back to Dr. Z. and told him how scared I was, he said, “No, no, no. I’ve never lost a patient I caught in the first stage and you’re right at the beginning of the first stage. I promise you, you will die of something else.”
I still don’t understand how those books could have been so wrong, but I was going to be okay and that’s what mattered. I had to do chemo, but not the classic kind. They gave me an ointment to take home with me. Twice a day I had to rub it into the patches. First, though, I had to put on latex gloves. Don’t touch it, but rub it on your body. Weird. But blessedly there wasn’t a single side effect. No nausea. No throwing up.
Still, it took three years to get to remission, so I had plenty of time to meditate on mortality. I asked a sweet couple I knew, one an oncology nurse and the other a hospice counselor, “Is it mostly like in the movies where people get a diagnosis and rise to the occasion?”
“Oh, no,” they said in chorus. “Most people regress.” Well, that was me. I had tumbled down into despair and despite my good news, I hadn’t climbed back out. I knew I was handling my illness wrong. I was calling my medicine poison, which it was, but that was not a good attitude to have about something I was counting on to heal me.
Then I read Love, Medicine and Miracles, by Bernie Siegel. He tells stories of exceptional patients, not that they all beat their cancer in the end, but they refused to surrender. They took charge of everything it was in their power to take charge of. And I caught their fighting spirit.
I called a number in the back of the book and tracked down Susan, an oncology nurse who did imagery work to promote healing. As soon as I sat down in her office, I told her, “I’m here to get my image and then I’ll go.” She had the kindness not to laugh at my naïveté. She smiled gently and said, “It doesn’t quite work like that. You’re the one who will find your imagery. It will work for you because it comes from inside. It might take more than one visit.”
Twenty minutes into the first session images came, tears behind my eyes, me throwing cancer out the upstairs window of my childhood home, my hands knowing how to rip open cancer cells, spilling their evil harmlessly on the earth which matter-of-factly recycled it into loam. That kind of thing. And they came to me. I didn’t have to struggle for them. It was like being on vacation. So different from the last couple decades of exhausting myself scrambling hard in the service of good causes.
By the end of the fourth session, I saw what I was really working on. Not cancer, but my life. I needed to do something with my underlying despair about myself, so I kept seeing Susan every other week for five years. I settled back into my routine, which I badly wanted to do. At the same time, I did not want to lose the intensity I experienced when I was so scared and every minute was utterly precious. That faded, but my sense of fight kept growing. I learned to call this the “life force.” Susan taught me that term. Later I heard it spoken with reverence in the cancer communities I cruised through for two months until I realized I didn’t belong there because my cancer was such a bunch of nothing. But I did get to see how the idea of the life force sustained people wrestling with terribly aggressive cancers who were so fiercely hanging on at the very edge of death.
During this time, I kept on with my obsessive studies. I made my way through more books on evolution, trying to understand why we as a species are going to die. In the cancer world, I had been taught never to use the word “terminal.” You were to say life-threatening illness. The rule was always, always to keep hope alive because you never knew when a seeming miracle might happen. And this made sense even if no miracle came.
I remember a woman who had breast cancer and did everything right. She ate right, she exercised right, she did all the best treatments, she gathered her friends around her to support her, she took advantage of every healthy moment to travel with her partner. Then three years after her diagnosis, she died right on schedule according to the statistics. But in her last month, she said she had no regrets about the fight she put up: “Maybe I didn’t get longer life but I got more life.”
I want that for us as a species, too. More life in the face of our death. I don’t want us to die before we’re dead. But the odds are against it. Despair is in the ascendancy. It’s taking over more and more human territory. When a society gives up on healthy, nurturing togetherness, when it gives up on community, what we’re left with is social despair. And if we can’t cure it, which in our time we can’t, that means we’re not just threatened, we’re terminal.
How does social despair manifest? Look at our culture. It runs on attack politics and attack media. You don’t just disagree with someone’s ideas, you take that person down. You don’t work to find common ground, you don’t join forces to make a better life for everyone, instead you attack with outrageous lies, vicious shaming, and character assassination. It’s such an awful way to live that most of us if polled would say we want this ugliness to stop, but polls don’t make it stop.
Look, too, at how our society runs on exploitation. I understand it’s not nice to mention exploitation in polite society, but we’re not a polite society. Still, we don’t need to feel some kind of special shame about how we behave because we’re hardly the only nation implicated. Mass exploitation has been the mainstay of mass society throughout recorded history. Those at the top lay claim to joyously obscene wealth and spend their days in redundant luxury at the expense of millions, now billions, who struggle through their daily lives always scared about tomorrow. Thomas Jefferson said, “The issue today is the same as it has been throughout history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.”
We’re living in a time when the mass submits to the elite. We live in a system that simply makes life easier for the rich and harder for the poor, and which is driving the middle class down toward poverty instead of bringing the poor up into the middle class. It’s a system that has abandoned us to the loneliness of every-man-for-himself politics. And if we can’t even put an end to the routine exploitation that our society runs on, how will we ever manage the much more difficult project of saving ourselves as a species?
Then look at our corporations, how they scramble for short-term profits like there’s no tomorrow. Just exactly like that because they’ve given up on tomorrow. Whalers hunt their livelihood to extinction. Agribusiness sucks dry the aquifers it depends on but which rainfall will not recharge in our lifetime. Developers pave over fertile farmland with suburban sprawl as though we’re not going to need food for all that much longer. Fossil fuel executives urge us to guzzle gas full steam ahead with no sure plan in place for what we’ll do after we’ve used the last drop. Nations meet up at conferences on climate change knowing as they go in they’ll come out with next to nothing but splashy self-congratulations. Meanwhile our mass media ply us with celebrity gossip and extravagant entertainments as they party us into oblivion.
And we’re not stopping this process. Maybe we’re making some progress around the edges, but we can’t seem to break the grip that systemic despair has on us. Despite the hopeful speeches about sustainability that some political leaders and some activists deliver, our hard-core economic behavior says we believe it’s over for us.
Which is frightening, because when large numbers of people are drowning together in despair they become a special kind of dangerous. First comes the implosion as you collapse into a silent helplessness. But to live out your days immersed in impotence is a hateful thing. And you might hate it so much that your hate turns to rage and that rage grows until you can’t hold it in anymore and you explode and rain your poison down on people who have less power than you and are less able to defend themselves. You punish them for your despair. And these are people who are hurting too much already. And you might think that by raging you’re taking action and that’s somehow going to do you some kind of good, but all you’re doing is acting out your despair not solving it. Which means it owns you. So you sink deeper into the very despair you’re trying to escape, which scares you even more, which makes you feel even more helpless, which makes you madder and meaner, and traps you in a desperately repeating cycle until you’re drowning in your drowning.
If, instead, we were talking about a little child having an angry tantrum, no problem. You’d gather him into your arms and hold him tight and speak to him calmly, comforting him: “You’re upset but you’re going to be okay because I’ve got you now, I’ve got you.” Afterward you’d help him find a better way to handle his distress. You’d help him learn step by step how to take responsibility for his feelings and actions and how that’s a lot more satisfying than raging out of control.
But what can we do when our whole nation is having a tantrum of despair-rage and there’s nobody big enough to pick us up and hold us and talk us through our fears and get us on the path to taking care of ourselves?
Meanwhile despair gets inside the very things we’re counting on to save us—religion, spirituality, and love, most especially love.
Take, for instance, these verses from Matthew 22 where Christ says, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
This is holy scripture. “Thou shalt” puts you under obligation. So maybe you go down to the kindergarten room in the church basement and call together the children playing there. Once they’ve hushed, these little ones with puppy hearts so eager to love everyone in their lives, so happy to offer their love freely as a gift, you tell them in your big voice: “You have to love God. You have to because he says so.” Then you pause for a beat and you choke on the ancient threat: “And if you don’t, he will make you burn in hell forever.”
Obedience can be commanded, pretense can be commanded, but not love. Love cannot be forced, not even with the most horrible threats. And when God tries to force it, isn’t he showing us that he does not believe we would ever love him out of our own spontaneous affection? Maybe he believes he’s not lovable just for himself. And isn’t he, in the act of commanding love, killing the very thing he’s hoping for? What could be a more bitter incarnation of despair?
In my twenties, in reaction to my disappointment with the religion of my childhood, I turned to Zen because it was supposed to be a mischievous antidote. I studied intently and if someone asked what I called myself and pushed me on it, I’d say I was a Buddhist, even though I didn’t like labels because they seemed un-Zen.
Most important to me were the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths since they taught how to detach from suffering. I learned to turn myself into a hot air balloon so I could float above the landscape of human misery, aware of it but untouched by it.
But to get airborne I had to detach from desire, even the desire to love other people and be loved by them. I learned to subdue my hungry human heart with disciplined stillness. Then one day I realized I’d never seen a picture of the Buddha doing anything but sitting on his butt, disappearing inside—not feeding the hungry, not organizing against oppression, not fighting for love. In that moment I couldn’t tell the difference between Zen emptiness and despair emptiness.
Done with religion, both West and East, but still in search of guidance, I went shopping in the world of spirituality where I was promiscuous. I auditioned myriad beliefs, two or three at a time. One that caught my attention was the doctrine of “loving what is.” That sounded like the opposite of detachment so I went to the workshop.
The teacher insisted that we love what is exactly as it is because reality is just what it needs to be so don’t argue with it and don’t think you know better than the universe and so you should accept everything, including suffering, including the worst, most evil suffering, swallow and smile.
I walked out mad. I don’t care if the full authority of the universe is behind what is, I refuse to love child abuse, I refuse to love brutality, I refuse to love warfare, I refuse to love the trouble we’re in, I refuse to love the coming death of humankind, I refuse to surrender to the despair that is the world as it is.
Another teaching, one that hooked me good, was “living in the present.” I first heard it preached by Ram Dass in the 1960s when he told us to “be here now.” This guidance is still very much in vogue today because it’s still emotionally compelling. In my case, I felt so embarrassed by my past I would have done pretty much anything to cut loose from it and sail into the future free of its drag. I wanted to start each day fresh and forward.
But what exactly is the Now? A mathematician might describe it as an infinitesimal point. But a human being can’t live inside such extreme tininess. There are psychologists, though, experts on the science of perception, who have discovered that the human Now is three seconds long, big enough to be habitable. Gurus of the Now assure us that we can live in pure immediacy. They say things like “the past means nothing to me.” But saying that does not make it so. Our past is always with us. Our personal history is absolutely here now in the billions of synapses in our brains that have developed throughout childhood and on into our adult years. The history of our species is here now in the DNA in our cells. Our future is here now in our longing for things to be better. It’s here now in possibilities we can imagine and in the actions we take to pursue and sometimes make those possibilities come true.
I keep working at being more present in the moment so I can be responsive to the people I’m with rather than letting distracting worries intrude. But to pack our bags and move entirely into the Now is not possible for us, and not good for us, because to shrink ourselves down into a three-second self is to surrender to despair. It’s an attempt to escape the difficulties of being human, which can’t really be done because, like it or not, in every present moment we’re also always creatures of the past and future. That’s how we’re made. And rather than trying to escape into the dinky Now that despair offers, I’d wish for us the strength to hold the pain of our past in our hearts with compassion, the real pain just as painful as it actually is. And I’d wish for us the strength to step into our future just as scared as we are, really just as scared, yet more engaged than ever.
When I look back at my decades of searching for guidance, I feel so sad, for myself, and for all of us. We’ve had two thousand years of commanded love, we’ve had twenty-five hundred years of detachment, we’ve got a teeming multitude of spiritualities, but still mass suffering continues, and, now to cap it all off, here we are face to face with extinction.
During my imagery sessions with Susan, strange characters showed up, human and animal, each teaching me a little something. But over time I settled in with rather ordinary images of hearts, specifically my own, and fell into the habit of asking myself whenever I had an important decision to make, “What’s deepest in my heart right now?” Mostly I didn’t know what. I had spent my childhood obeying shoulds, so my heart was a stranger.
Then one rainy night when I was filled with too much sadness to be able to get to sleep, I stood at my window long past bedtime looking out at the backs of the apartment buildings that ring my block, watching one light go out, then another, as those other folks went off to bed. I thought about how the day had been too much for me and how this human world is too much for me, and I asked myself my stock question but this time with a shift: “What’s deepest in my heart always?”
The answer was right there: “The part of me that always loves me enough to fight for me.”
Which gave me a lot to think about over the following months, and years, and still.
I grew up in a quietly repressive Calvinist church community where we learned to despise ourselves, so it did not compute that I could have a part of me that always loves me. But I wanted it. And even if I had to make it up, so what? This was exactly what I needed, so I decided to do whatever it took to grow into it and make it come true.
And what did this always-love want? It wanted me to fight. Me, the compulsive nice guy. “Fight” had never been one of my words. Not that I hadn’t taken stands for what I believed in. I had done that despite being such a shy person. But of all the things it could choose, why did my heart want this? Why fight? Oh, because we are in a fight. We’re in a fight with despair, and despair is a terrible enemy. Because despair is not just a feeling. It’s the consequence of the deep structure of our operating system. And it plays dirty. Despair is a global dementor hell-bent on sucking out our souls. It wants to take from us everything that makes us a blessing to the people in our lives.
So I understood that if I could find my fight, I could turn it against my despair. But then what about love? Weren’t fight and love opposites? Wouldn’t they cancel each other out? And what about compassion, the sweet, vulnerable source of love, what would fight do to that? I had learned well the conventional church-version of compassion which insisted that no matter what, you must always be polite, mild-mannered, reasonable, undemanding, and never rock the boat. But that’s not compassion, that’s submission.
No wonder I was always grinding my gears in my activist endeavors. I wanted to fight for what I believed in, but I was always held back by my compulsion to make nice. For example, in the 1960s during the protests against the Vietnam War, I remember marching on the Pentagon. A wave of us surged through the bushes and over the crest of a hill and suddenly found ourselves facing rows of soldiers in battle gear, their rifles leveled at us and tipped with very real bayonets. I could see it in their eyes that they were scared. And god knows, I was scared. The pounding in my ears told me that. I wished I could have held up a sign that said, “Sorry, I’m really a very nice person but this war is so wrong and actually immoral that I feel duty-bound to protest. How about if we talk and find common ground?”
I knew a few activists who loved demonstrating. It was sport for them. The rowdier the better. But for me, it was always steeped in sadness. I couldn’t get over it that my country, which I so wanted to love, was doing such bad things.
Years later my gears were still grinding when I did my child abuse prevention work. We were busy going from school to school in our local area teaching children self-defense, when we got a call to come to Sacramento to draft legislation to provide funding for prevention training everywhere in the state. We had no idea what we were getting into. We were so naïve we thought no one could possibly oppose children’s safety.
And they didn’t exactly. Our opponents said they were all for keeping children safe, but what they didn’t want us to do was teach children how to say no. Especially if that meant sometimes disobeying adults who were in authority over them. They wanted children to grow up submitting to the status quo.
But the whole point of our work was to teach children how to fight for themselves, and the stand I took for children’s safety was absolute. No one could back me off that. It was as deep in my heart as anything. But at the same time the full force of my own childhood was hammering me, “You have to be nice. You have to keep everyone happy. Including your opponents. You have to make them like you. You’re not allowed to upset anyone no matter what kind of threat they are to your work.” I was supposed to win over our toughest opposition politely, no ruffling of feathers. No matter how mean they were to us, I was not allowed to hurt their feelings. I was supposed to nice the bullies into being nice. Which never worked, not even once.
Something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be the children. Luckily there were dozens of activists and many thousands of parents who took that stand, too, and together we did the work to get the legislation passed. In the end four million children got training in self-defense, and in the process I finally began to learn for myself what we were teaching the kids.
These days when I talk about compassion, I feel the need to add a modifier and call it fierce compassion, to be clear what it is I’m giving my allegiance to. I know my childhood church would not have wanted me to marry those two words together, but you know, Jesus was not a nice guy. He opposed the Roman Empire, which was the superpower of his day. He opposed the takeover of his country and the brutality of the occupying army. He refused to bow to the hierarchy of his religion. He spoke out against the High Priest who was colluding with the Roman rulers. And, most essentially, Jesus took a very public, noisy, and uncompromising stand on behalf of the poor, the outcast, and the downtrodden—a dangerous stand to take because the Romans insisted on a quiescent population living in abject subjugation. It was the moral fierceness Jesus demonstrated and his outspokenness that earned him a very hard death.
I grew up on Jesus. He was my model for compassion. He was the first activist I ever heard about. So why didn’t I simply inherit his fierceness? Because I had been taught a contradiction: Worship Jesus, but don’t you dare follow in his footsteps. Worship Jesus, but obey the church.
And in my church, there was not one person who was the kind of radical troublemaker Jesus was. It would not have been tolerated. Every Sunday morning, we sat stiffly in our pews, slogged through hymns, and endured stultifying sermons. That’s what we did instead of going out in public to oppose injustice.
Yet, even though our minister taught submission, there was still Jesus. And without knowing what was happening, I developed a crush on his fierceness.
Which included his anger. He was angry at the oppression of the Romans; I was angry at my church for keeping love so small. But as a grown-up I saw myself keeping my anger small. Miniscule. I was scared of it. I put a lid on it but it was still in there, simmering, building up pressure. And if anyone got angry at me, my stomach clutched and my knees got wobbly, because I didn’t have a solid place to stand within myself.
The people I looked to for advice didn’t help. A relationship expert I followed said anger is always wrong, always a mistake, so eliminate it from your life. The anger management gurus I listened to weren’t teaching how to manage anger, as in how to make it work for you, they wanted it gone.
Anger is called a “negative emotion.” But the purpose of emotion is to move us to meet our needs. The word itself is mostly made up of “motion.” And this can get confusing. Love, which we call a positive emotion, is sometimes bad for you, like if you fall in love with someone abusive. And if your anger motivates you to meet a genuine need, then how can we disparage it by calling it negative?
An emotion in and of itself is neither good or bad, what matters is the consequence it leads to. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Like the spark that ignites the fuel in an engine, anger is the stimulus that initiates action.” Gandhi said, “As heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.”
I can look back at my life and remember times when I put anger to work for a good purpose—like preventing child abuse. I called it passion, but it was an angry passion. It rose up from the depths. It came to me as a primal NO: “Abuse has to stop, it just has to.” It came to me as a primal YES: “Children have to be safe, they just have to be.”
I remember when I first heard the Dalai Lama say, “My religion is kindness,” I was so happy that in a world where so many behave as if their religion is nothing more than hate speech, a world-famous religious leader was putting kindness first. Yet kindness is not enough, not in a fight with despair, not in a fight with evil. So while lovingkindness, that sweet watchword of Buddhism, is a good start, what I find I need is lovingfierceness.
And, really, if I care about people, how could I not be angry about exploitation, abuse, poverty, warfare, and racism? And about the death of our species.
Here’s the lesson I finally learned. The more you’ve got nurturing anger working for you, the less chance you’ll get sucked into despair-rage, because these two are opposites.
One night I went to a bookstore reading to hear an author promote her brand of spirituality. The minute she was done, an earnest woman sitting next to me turned and asked, “Are you a spiritual person?”
“No, not really.”
“Well, are you a religious person?”
“No, not even close.”
I heard a little humpff and she squinted at me as if to say, “Then what are you?” I didn’t want her to write me off. I wanted her to know that I’m a person of some depth who cares about the eternal questions, so I blurted out in self-defense: “I’m a moral person.” It didn’t register with her and she turned away.
But for me it was a first. Instead of saying what I was not, calling myself a nonbeliever, I told her what I was: moral. A definite identity. Realizing this, I broke into a big smile.
Except I hated that word “moral” because it keeps such wretched company. The loudest shouters about morality are righteous and judgmental and just plain mean. They wield their morality like a bludgeon: Follow our rules or we’ll punish you and we’ll be glad to do it.
But where did that word come from originally? We’re a social-group species and every group needs its own customs, rituals, and mores in order to keep itself together and cooperative. And it’s from mores that we get morality. It’s not an optional thing. It’s a fundamental element of human community, the most fundamental.
When people don’t trust their own hearts, they turn morality into a rigid set of rules to be obeyed, like a criminal code. But we can do so much better than that. We can source our morality from nurturance. We can make it relational instead of categorical. We can make it nuanced instead of simpleminded. We can make it responsive instead of intransigent. And this means we can use it to make compassionate decisions. We can use it to answer the elemental questions: How do I want to treat other people? How do I want them to treat me? And, not to be overlooked, because this, too, is a moral question: How do I want to treat myself?
Even though for years now, “moral” has been a very important word to me, I still hesitate to use it. Sometimes when I say it, I quickly add in parentheses, (“What I mean by ‘moral’ is mutual nurturance and mutual advocacy.”) I do that because I don’t want people to misjudge me. Sometimes I throw this interruption into the conversation so often it gets annoying, once to the point where the other person said, “All right already, I get what you mean.”
“Moral” is a battleground word. There’s nothing easy about it. But I haven’t found a substitute I like better.“Ethics” is okay, but to me it feels too academic, legal, and cold. “Moral” has historical significance and emotional resonance, and for me, warmth. “Fight” is a word I’m very much at ease with now, except I need to be clear I mean moral fight.
And this brings me to the word “soul.” In church I was taught that my soul was invisible, immaterial, insubstantial, and incorporeal—all adjectives of nothingness. At the same time it was a divine presence. God shot it into my body at birth from his dwelling place in the heavens above, out there beyond the clouds, beyond the stratosphere where the airplanes travel. No wonder it felt cold. Outer-space cold.
“Soul” is used to mean so many things—essential self, transcendent spirit, deepest calling, driving passion, anchoring force, what makes you you, that something that survives death.
But I use it to mean just one thing. My soul is my deeply personal, daily practice of moral decision-making.
My soul is not divine, it’s mine. It’s a handmade, homemade soul. And even though it’s personal, it’s not solo. It’s a social soul, because my relationships with other people are at the center of my concerns.
I use “soul” as a nickname for what’s deepest in my heart. And this is not just another pretty phrase, because that deepest place is my place of moral labor.
Sometimes I tell myself, “I choose to live by what’s deepest in my heart instead of by what’s deepest in my genes.” This makes no sense biologically because our genes generate our hearts and everything else we are. Yet the distinction works for me. It’s true that evolution is forcing us into extinction, but it designed us so that it’s possible for us to do the most amazing thing—oppose our source, which is itself.
Here’s how I see it now. Human DNA is two biological strands of protein nucleotides plus one virtual strand of moral imagination. Our twist of grace.
It’s because we’re moral beings that we can make of love something that transcends the default evolution has given us. Instead of inching along, getting incrementally better at conventional love, we get to take a leap. We get to play big. We get to upgrade love. We get to fiercen it up. And in doing so, we’re able to love ourselves way better than evolution has ever loved us.
How does hope fit into this picture? It doesn’t have to. I remember a rally in San Francisco where a cold fog was blowing through as the final speaker jammed the mike against his mouth to blast out a warning: “If you don’t have hope you won’t do anything!” His undertone of contempt implied: “And if you don’t do anything, you won’t be anybody, not anybody worth caring about.”
I shrank into my jacket, not wanting him to spot me because I don’t have hope. Cheers broke out all around and I shrank more, then checked myself, “Wait a minute, he can’t mean me because I don’t believe in doing nothing. Maybe that’s just his fear talking.”
I remember that fear: if hope dies, everything dies. That’s how it looks from the scared side of hope. But that’s not what life is actually like on the far side. So what if hope is gone? You don’t have to stop being yourself. You feed the hungry because that calls to you. You help victims of abuse because you want them to be okay. You try to change the government because you can’t abide policies that produce suffering. You work to stop war because you hate it. You build bridges across the divisions of race because that nurtures your soul.
We’re told there are only two ways to live—believe in hope or suffer despair. But there’s a third way. We can follow the path of moral fight. And when we do, we discover that our hearts are bigger than our despair. We realize that who we are matters more than our fate. We find out that no matter how doomed the world, no matter how close death comes, we don’t ever have to stop caring, because love does not depend on hope.
Sometimes people call us names, those of us who don’t believe. I used to call myself those names, but not anymore. I never think of myself as a pessimist, a cynic, or a naysayer, even though I have such a dark view of the future. I’m not a nihilist—I’m a fighter. At least in my own way. At least on my best days. And even on days when I can’t find my fight, I still wish to be a fighter.
This post-hope life is so bitter and so sweet. Bitter because hope is dead and our species will soon be dead and we will likely die an evil death. But inside that darkness there’s a sustaining sweetness—our desire to fight for mutual nurturance. It can’t save us, but it can bless us. It can’t give us tomorrow, but it can give us today. And we can use this fight, this moral desire, this twist of grace, to make of our lives a fierce love story down inside the tragedy of us.
