100 days of hope — 7. Why?

I don’t know exactly why I’ve decided to write about hope for 100 days.

I guess I’m interested in what emerges through the process.

I feel love and loved, I feel gratitude, I feel connection but I don’t know if I feel hope.

I guess it’s worth being more specific, the hope I feel like I’m missing is the hope that the future is at least as good as the past — for me, for the people I love, for all people and for all life on this planet

I feel like we’ve chosen Thelma and Louise as our collective end story and we’re just entering the final scene. I can’t tell if we’re intentionally ignoring the brakes or we just don’t know where to find them.

Maybe this is just a fixation with my own annihilation that I’m not able to put to one side while I live a full life, maybe I’ve flown a little to close to the sun with some of the more mystical experiences I’ve been through where a huge death-event has felt imminent, maybe I’m still mourning the loss of my father and the loss of the innocence of childhood.

I think as a mathematician I’m terrified of exponentials. Like covid outbreaks in the UK and around the world, it all starts rather casual but before we know it we’re talking about hopsitals’ being overrun in a matter of days. I see exponential functions in so many different fields, like a mountain full of snowballs growing in size and picking up momentum as they speed down towards us.

I worry that our efforts to make sense of the increasingly complex world we have manifested will remain disparate, disjointed, disconnected and in effect this will leave us powerless to whatever global events are awaiting us around the next few corners.

So I find myself searching for something. Something to make me feel like it might work out alright, like this might not be the end. I’m calling that thing I’m searching for hope.