Dear Bailey and Anon,

It is understandable to feel alarmed by the current state of things, to feel fearful and depressed. We are presented with a constant communiqué of despair, that we exist in the worst of times, indeed, the end of times. Many feel impotent in this dreadful imminence – words like ‘Happy New Year’ ring hollow, like a hangover from a bygone better time. We become what we consume, living embodiments of a catastrophe foretold. We turn in on ourselves, trapped within the dark pathology of our time. Now, here we are at the beginning of a new year, and Bailey and Anon, like you, many feel 😬 and hopeless.

So, what is hope, and what is hope for? Hope is an emotional temper that emboldens the heart to be active, it is a condition, a mood, an aura of being. It is a feat of the imagination, both courageous and ingenious, a vitality that inspires us to take innovative action to defend the world. Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing.

We achieve this vitality of spirit by rejecting the relentless promotion of despair and opening our eyes to the beauty of things, however imperilled, degraded, or difficult to love the world may appear to be. We try to view the world not as it is packaged, presented and sold to us but as we imagine it could be. We do not look away from the world, we look directly at it and allow the spirit of hope – the necessary driver of change – to inspire us to action.

I wrote in Faith, Hope and Carnage, ‘Hope is optimism with a broken heart’. This means that hope has an earned understanding of the sorrowful or corrupted nature of things, yet it rises to attend to the world even still. We understand that our demoralisation becomes the most serious impediment to bettering the world. In its active form, hope is a supreme gesture of love, a radical and audacious duty, whereas despair is a stagnant rejection of life itself. Hope becomes the energy of change.

Over Christmas your question went around in my mind, Bailey. I write this on New Year’s Day, and Christmas has come and gone. Ours was a large, noisy family affair that revolved around my infant grandson, Roman. Magisterial in his highchair, I watched him being fed by his doting parents – this bright, new child – and your question seemed to melt into the vision of that little boy, his face covered in avocado, a radiant affirmation of that small word – hope. On that Christmas day, I saw the vitality of hope in action.

Bailey, Anon, and everyone else – have a wonderful and joyful new year.

Love, Nick

PS. For Christmas, I was given Byung-Chul Han’s The Spirit of Hope, a beautiful book on the nature of hope. It greatly informed this answer, and I highly recommend it.