In times of rapid social change, our leaders often speak glibly of hope and joy as antidotes to fear and anxiety. When we have deep attachments, fear and anxiety are very real, rational, justified. But hope and joy as cerebral nouns have no agency over visceral fear and anxiety. Certainly, hope--as well as joy--can be galvanizing, but as Hannah Arendt said, it can also be paralyzing.
Passive hope and joy are not antidotes. Hope and joy must be catalyzing. Hope and joy are, and elicit, a promise by acting on a promise.
In Nowness (sentience) with all the senses (faculties) centered, the nouns hope and joy become verbs with agency, and then as verbs they move from the infinitive to the participle. They become adjectives that describe, that activate, our agency. Work, Working, Working woman. Hope, Hoping, Hoping man. The working woman tills and keeps the soil. The hoping man plants a seedling.
When one plants a seedling, hope-the-noun becomes hope-the-verb and then hope-the-catalyst of one's agency. When you let joy-the-noun catch you, joy-the-verb becomes a catalyst for reciprocating joy.
Hope and joy, then, are like infectious agents (nouns) that hijack the molecular machinery of our soul and churn out (verbs) prodigious quantities of clones of themselves amplifying hope and joy in ourselves that is transmitted to others. Hope and Joy become catalysts for promise.
The promise of Hope and Joy is revealed when a seedling pops up through the early Spring snow cover. Working woman and hoping man made a joyous, transformative promise and the seedling received and fulfilled it. And that is how we get out of this environmental mess. Or, as Inez Aponte more eloquently and poignantly explains: "The wrong question is: How do we reduce carbon emissions? The right question is: How do we meet our genuine needs versus our manufactured wants while regenerating the ability of the Earth to sustain life?"
Photo attribution: An embed from Getty Images by Jana Engel