Krista Tippett on hope

“I talk about hope being a muscle. It’s not wishful thinking, and it’s not idealism. It’s not even a belief that everything will turn out OK. It’s an imaginative leap, which is what I’ve seen in people like John Lewis¹ and Jane Goodall². These are people who said: ‘I refuse to accept that the world has to be this way. I am going to throw my life and my pragmatism and my intelligence at this insistence that it could be different and put that into practice.’ That’s a muscular hope. So, to your question, I don’t always feel robustly hopeful. Depression is something I’ve struggled with. I’ve found the world an unbearable place for months at a time in the last two years. But at the same time I don’t feel like there’s a place in my work for my despair.”

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“None of us are perfect, but all over the place in every community and field of endeavor, there are people who are working generatively with the challenges before us; meeting them, rising to their best human capacities — at least on their good days — and creating new possibilities and realities. They’re not publicized, they’re not investigated, but that landscape is as real and important as that landscape of everything we can point out as failing and corrupt and catastrophic.”

— from Marchese, D. (2022, July 5). Krista Tippett Wants You to See All the Hidden Signs of Hope. The New York Times.

¹ From the politician and civil-rights icon’s 2013 “On Being” appearance: “I think sometimes people are afraid to say, ‘I love you.’ . . . Maybe people tend to think something is so emotional about it. Maybe it’s a sign of weakness. And we’re not supposed to cry. We’re supposed to be strong, but love is strong. Love is powerful.”

² The primatologist appeared on “On Being” in 2020: “Bizarre, isn’t it, that the most intellectual creature, surely, that’s ever lived on the planet is destroying its only home. And I always believe it’s because there’s a disconnect between that clever, clever brain and human heart, love and compassion.”