"Hope is a discipline." - On Community, Self, & Care

As this whopper of a year comes to a close, I’ve found myself reflecting quite often on some words from Mariame Kaba, an incredible abolitionist, transformative & restorative justice practitioner, activist, curator, educator, etc. So often, in fact, that they ring in my ears. (Read/listen to Mariame speak about this here, and her talk on mutual aid here)

I always tell people, for me, hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism.

I think that for me, understanding that is really helpful in my practice around organizing, which is that, I believe that there’s always a potential for transformation and for change. And that is in any direction, good or bad. The idea of hope being a discipline is something I heard from a nun many years ago who was talking about it in conjunction with making sure we were of the world and in the world. Living in the afterlife already in the present was kind of a form of escape, but that actually it was really, really important for us to live in the world and be of the world. The hope that she was talking about was this grounded hope that was practiced every day, that people actually practiced it all the time. 

And so, I bowed down to that. I heard that many years ago and then I felt the sense of, Oh my god. That speaks to me as a philosophy of living, that hope is a discipline and that we have to practice it every single day.

Some days, these words ring empty. Some days, there is pitifully little space for hope in the midst of rage and despair. Looking around this world there are more than enough reminders of all the ways we have failed, stand to fail, insist on failing to prevent harm, to uplift, to protect those who need it most.

And yet, it’s there. Always, all ways. Hope. Clinging on to the corners of thoughts, to the movement of my body, to nature, to the boundless potential of our minds and capacity for compassion, care, love.

I’m drawn, on the days when the words ring empty, to concepts like mutual aid. Dean Spade describes this as such:

“mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts, or putting pressure on representatives, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.“

We are in a time, globally, when community care and self-care are so clearly indelibly intertwined. To care for ourselves during this pandemic IS to care for our communities. To create health for ourselves IS to create health for others. To cover our faces with masks, keep at a distance, reduce the number of people we interact with as much as possible IS to create safer spaces for those around us. These are things we do for our selves, and for our communities.

This concept, however, extends well past this pandemic, forward and backward in time. We have always been indelibly connected. Self-care is community care is self-care. Yes, there are limits to this—I am not talking about selfish-care, of course. Not the stuff of a capitalistic attempt to co-opt wellness and health by convincing us we must buy unnecessary things to create wellness in ourselves. I’m talking about the self-care that brings us into attunement with the best versions of ourselves, so that we may step out into the world in our communities a more effective and present member, a person who is resourced and strengthened enough to help carry the load of this thing called life in collective terms. I’m talking about that putting your mask on first on the plane before helping others, thing.

So how do we build new social relations that are more survivable? We listen. We unlearn. We learn anew. We listen more. We do deep self-work. We create community and sustain community and lengthen the bounds of our communities, learning the language of other ways of being. We REMEMBER ways of being forcibly removed from our canons of thoughts and IMAGINE new ways of being that are responsive to the needs of the most marginalized, and ACT our way out of systems of thinking and being. We tear it down and build it up again. We provide care for one another in the process.

We never lose sight of the fact that the systems and institutions of oppression that have governed us for so long will take time to dismantle, and that in the meantime, we have tremendous collective power to revolt against systems that would have us suffer by collecting together to help one another thrive. It’s not a replacement for the systemic support that SHOULD be there, and, it is what we must do for one another until it is.

Solidarity. Liberation. Participation. These are the cornerstones of mutual aid, the basis from which our actions must arise, no matter the sector or sphere we are moving from or within.

Don’t get me wrong, none of those three things is easy, they are all easier said than done. And so is everything else that’s remotely worth it.

Hope is a practice. A discipline. A life goal. An accomplishment. An always-reaching-towards. A being. Hope is what we must operationalize, make into action, make into matter.

If you’d like to start out 2021 by joining me in imagining and planning our actions for the next year, please sign up for the Setting Intention One-Day Online Retreat!

We’ll be taking a mindful approach to deep reflection and restoration, and planning for action in our spheres for the next year.

We’ve got this, together. Have hope. Treat it like your discipline.