deep hope

what stories cannot teach

In times of heightened uncertainty, I’ve noticed an interesting social phenomenon: well-meaning friends, family, and colleagues have an urge, a sort of compulsion, to offer me a perspective on what’s happening to the world.

Midwives describe a global rebirthing process.

Astrologers nod to a sacred realignment.

Mystics say light-workers are being called to higher vibrations.

Elders point to a collapse of modern order and a restoration of balance.

Philosophers speculate on ‘Dune’ people rising.

Humanists herald a shift toward Symbiotic Culture.

Deep ecologists reference the Great Turning.

There’s a grab-bag of stories about the future at my disposal, a cornucopia of ways I’m encouraged to put my meaning-making machinery to good use. Pick a story, Sun, any story. Take refuge in one or more of these worldviews. This sounds like a critique of my social circle’s offerings but it’s simply an observation. I respect that stories have been our forever-companions, our inspirations and horizons for hope. Rife with delusion or divorced from reality, still, we need them for comfort. I appreciate the humanity in that. But what these well-meaning people don’t know about me is that I’m not looking for a narrative to explain the world.

When I talk about current events in conversation, I’m not soliciting an explanation of the bigger picture. I’m not asking for an answer to the question of our fate, not hoping someone will solve the mystery of the direction of the new world order. I may be giving the impression I could use a bedtime story, but more likely what’s happening is that my friends are comforting themselves by steering me away from tough emotions or fearsome knowledge, offering a tidier narrative, one they’re clinging to for safety. They seem to think my confusion or sorrow or bearing witness to hard things is an experience I need to be distracted from, something that requires a solution in the form of a story.

Unpopular as it is, I’m not trying to make sense of anything. I’m not seeking to feel better about the world. I’m not trying to understand it, or fix it, or browbeat it into obedience. Hell, I’m not even trying to change it in some noteworthy, applaudable way. I don’t need to make a dent in my front door, nevermind the universe. It’s not that I’m fatalistic and I stand for nothing. It’s that I don’t feel upset at the world for doing what it does, so I don’t require an encouraging story to make it bearable. I’m no more mad at the world for its ruthless assembly and disassembly than I am at the ocean for reshaping the face of a cliff. Our sapien adventure may end in calamity, utopia, or somewhere in-between. I don’t profess to know. I also don’t need to. Even if I were handed the Godmother of myths, the story arc to rule them all, still, I couldn’t force myself to believe it. In my broader awareness, I would know it’s only a story, one story, and if I were raised in a border town, or born a thousand years ago, or if I entered the world through your parents instead of mine, I would have different stories to believe in. Because of this awareness, I can’t take enduring refuge in parables, even those topping the bestsellers of all time, even those brimming with wisdom.

At this age and stage, I would rather just be uncomfortable, practicing not knowing the forecast. And I cherish those friends who will sit alongside me in the stone-cold, hard-nosed truth: that no one on Earth knows what happens next, no one can reveal how this great world will turn, no one can predict what’s unfolding. I already know intimately—in your bones you do, too—that meeting the intolerable truth of uncertainty, the dismembering rush of groundlessness, helps us grow up and stay awake, makes us agile and adaptive. We are flimsy, more fragile, when we cling to illusions, when we pretend to know something we can’t possibly. Not-knowing, for me, has been the birthplace of creativity, a current that washes treasures ashore. So I take comfort in Tilopa’s radical precept: Don’t try to figure anything out. In his counter-intuitive, seemingly nihilistic counsel, is instead profound honesty, intense love, like a mother explaining your beloved pet has died, she does not know precisely where he is, and he’s not coming back in the shape in which you loved him. In your heart, you sense your mother tells these truths not because she’s insensitive and careless but because she knows you came in with the capacity to metabolize them. She knows that you turning toward—not away from—the sallow grit of life is the ultimate in affirming life itself.

A deep-sea angel. Image from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

In the book Deep Hope by Diane Eshin Rizzetto, she makes a crucial distinction between vain hope and deep hope. Vain hope is the kind that operates in a closed system—a system that arises when we clutch partial perspectives and limited ideas about life. Vain hope, by its nature, makes us attach to particular outcomes. We build strategic roadmaps, tackle intellect and operations, then drive pointedly toward a goal. But when things turn out differently than we planned, vain hope generates resentment, rage, bitterness, blame, despair. These afflictive emotions arise because vain hope “fails to appreciate the complexity of conditions”¹ we face. It also seals us in the land of story—a risky place where one notion held too tightly ill-prepares us for what may come, where one gripped assumption can cause mercurial backlash and harm.

I have watched my own mind fall in love with a story, seen it work to make an event fit my nifty worldview. And I’ve clocked the high price I paid for that effort: my way-finding became constrained, my imagination confined, my emotional balance suddenly precarious, under a knife. When the things we long for, strive for, slip through our hands, then we know the futility of fairytales. When my path is pummeled and my dreams are in the dust, I don’t give my life over to fiction.

I have always strengthened my will to live in the place where stories fall apart.

This brings us to deep hope—the beating heart of our aliveness. Deep hope teaches that what’s reliable is uncertainty, what is absolutely incoming is change. This kind of hope knows the true marks of our existence—impermanence, adversity, disruption, infinite potential. It is born the moment we say yes to the ruthless furnace,² the instant we stop nursing delusions of bending the world to our will and we walk with composure to the richest part of the story—the part where we no longer need the story and we find an inner sanctum to rise to the occasion. Deep hope surrenders supposed-to’s, should-be’s, and oughts, and it welcomes a perplexingly benevolent reality, one in which all is lost and all is well at the same time. When we know that place, the very place from which we came, our power is intwined with the infinite.

With this kind of hope, we do more potent, useful work—work that serves ourselves and others regardless of the outcome. Our performance-driven skills can support our efforts, but the real opportunity lies in inner work that brings ingenuity, equanimity, discernment, wise compassion. This work sustains us across lifetimes.

I am not suggesting that we stop telling stories, that we relinquish them as solace and inspiration. Stories can and do offer startling truths but they cannot hold all the energy of life. It is better for us to know our mythologies for what they are: illuminations to get us through the night. Embodying deep hope is much braver than a story. In deep hope, we sit up; we stay present; we pay attention. We learn to dig deep and let go. We make no meaning from demise or resurrection. We stay in awe of the mystery. Yes, there is grief when we discard our stories and embrace life’s teeming arrays, but in this exchange we return to the source, recalling the miraculousness of all things great and terrible and calling on our capacity to wholeheartedly love the world—no matter how the story goes, no matter how it may end.

1. From Deep Hope: Zen Guidance for Staying Steadfast When the World Seems Hopeless by Diane Eshin Rizzetto, Introduction, p. xii.

2. An expression from the poem A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert.