Waiting and Hoping

It is challenging to find words to express what we’re going through. Pins have been stuck in many of the balloons of American public life. The air is leaking out of them. I am searching dictionaries in different languages to find the right words for my own response to this collapse, this implosion. Spanish gives me esperar. Esperar means both to wait and to hope. The word conveys our existential reality. We will have to wait for things to get better, hoping that positive change will take place and bring some deliverance sooner rather than later. This does not mean we have to be passive about change, while someone else takes the risks that will be necessary to put pressure on the system, doing nothing while Rome burns. It’s simply an acknowledgment of the long road ahead of us and the small steps, the steady march forward, that will allow us to reach our destination or at least a way station, some place of respite. In the Plum Village tradition of Thich Nhat Hahn, principles of living mindfully and with kindness such as refraining from speaking ill of others, are regarded as aspirational, from the same Latin root as esperar. The tradition does not lay down fixed rules that must be followed to the letter all at once. It puts forth ideals that a practitioner hopes to achieve, growth to aspire to, understanding that these things take time.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

In America, this patient approach to change is deeply countercultural. There’s hardly an opportunity to hope. Our capacity for sitting in suffering with patience and intention has atrophied. Everything has to happen on Day 1. Certainly, the new rightwing ascendancy bases its approach on shock and awe, doing everything so fast that we can’t catch our collective breath. They set the pace and we feel forced to scramble just to keep up, to keep from falling backward. But nothing is ever born in a hurry. Gestation is the deep state of Being. Ask any woman who has nurtured new life inside of her own. In order for something to manifest, the causes and conditions, as the Buddhists say, must be in right alignment. If a baby or a movement for change emerges too early, it may not survive. This is very difficult to bear. Especially for those of us who have already lived most of our natural lives. To think that I may not live long enough to see the liberation of the Earth and its people is a source of great anguish. To think that I may take my last breath inside a dense black cloud on its way to autocracy is a cause for despair that I will need to work with by contemplating the long arc of history with faith. I will need to remember the Civil Rights movement and the Anti-War movement.

All of these words - esperar, aspiration and its sorrowful opposite desperation, derive from words for activities of the breath - respiration, inspiration, expiration. Breath and spirit are one. Breath and spirit are the necessary conditions. Without breath and spirit there can be no life, no hope. I saw my father take his last breath at New York Hospital in 1978. This was before I worked with Hospice patients. I had never seen anyone die before and I was not familiar with the long waiting at the bedside, the hoping for another inhale as the breaths became separated by longer and longer intervals so you never knew which would be the last. Some days in the last week in our country, it has felt like that. Will the pardoning of the January 6th insurrectionists do us in? Will the defunding of Medicaid and countless other services be the blow that American democracy cannot recover from?

It’s like our now all too familiar wildfires and floods, this constant assault and all the writing and speech that accompanies it. It moves so fast and wrenches our sense of safety out from under us. From time to time, I come across an idea that feels like a raft that I can cling to. People are saying that it takes a long time to dismantle a democracy even though at the moment it feels like the whole thing is collapsing like a deck of cards. Waiting and hoping will be crucial as will finding ways to reinforce the structures of positive community. Waiting and hoping together will be more generative than waiting and hoping alone. This takes some energy and desire. It’s easier to crawl into a corner of the basement like a dying cat. Please don’t do that. Be sustained by people and institutions that you care about, the balloons that remain. Watch them rise into the sky and fly far into the distance. Red ones, blue ones, yellow ones, purple ones.

Photo by Roman Synkevych on Unsplash

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