Hope

“At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting…that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.” Simone Weil (from a 1943 essay)

When I read this, I realized that Weil has put into a succinct phrase that it is this spark that we call hope that makes us human. We are not the only noble animals on the planet. The elephant is more loyal, the wolf more beautiful, the lemur more agile, and so on, but it is for us humans alone to hope. We are the planners of the animal kingdom. We are the animals who can design, and who can imagine that which has not yet happened. We can hope that life will deal well with us, even when we have proof of the opposite. Each time our child leaves our sight, we hope that she will return to us well and whole. And when our bodies develop a disease process, or break down in some way, while hope may take flight for a while, it resurfaces in the consultation with doctors or healers, in the participation in clinical trials, in the ability to forbear the losses that sometimes cannot be avoided.

Humans are certainly not the only animals that grieve. A swan grieving the loss of its lifelong mate is noisy enough to call up all the demons of hell, but as I think of it, humans are probably the only animals that grieve the loss of hope, because we are the only ones able to project into a future in a way that gives us reason to hope.

Today, I am a flurry of mixed emotions. My daughter has been away, and I have a premonition that this is the time when she is getting ready to launch herself into the greater world in a way she has not done before. No matter what I projected out there into the future as her mother, that little girl, of whom I was only the steward for a while, was going to make her own way into the world, design her own sacred life in her own sacred time and I think that she is going to tell me about it in the next few days. Is it the future I would have designed? Probably not, because we are separate people, with different expectations based on different life experiences and a very different knowledge base. But I am lucky enough to be able to depend on her good sense, her good values, and her goodness to hope that she will make good choices that will carry her through. She is the child who remained close to home, who never tested her wings in small ways as some children do before they take an initial test flight. Those wings remained folded until I worried that their suppleness would be lost and flight would not be possible. But her I sit, awaiting her return from a flight I had no idea was coming (but which I endorsed), waiting to see what the landing will bring. She is not rushing back to the nest, she is taking her time to acclimate to the sea change she has undergone. I eagerly await becoming acquainted with the person my previously familiar child has become.

So if this, hope, above all is sacred in every human being, then for the next several days, I will respect the sacred thoughts that pass through my mind, the sacred wishes that my heart and soul make for the future happiness of my beloved child, and treat myself like the blessed parent I have been.