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Fuzzy Socks and My Secret Book of Hope
How I prepare to battle against evil and apathy
The most beautiful thing about humans is our ability to create hope. Hope itself is a crazy thing. It’s an irrational notion that things can be better — and when properly nurtured and given enough time — that irrational notion has a way of becoming reality.
Hope gives us the strength to persevere amidst the horrors that life throws at us. Hope is why we continue to get up day after day as we undertake the Sisyphean task of making the world kinder and more just when many of our fellow humans are hell-bent on making the world crueler and twisting justice to their own ends.
In literature, my favorite example of the power of hope is in the books Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. Lauren, the main character in Parable of the Sower, records this in her diary to describe the new belief system she is crafting and discovering:
The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.
Lauren has no rational basis to hope that her ideas will ever find expression in anything other than her diary, let alone spreading to the stars. Her home is literally on fire, and society is devolving into chaos. But still, Lauren hopes.
