Despair and hopelessness tell us how deeply we are grieving the threat or damage done to something or someone we love. Despair in the face of the Climate Crisis can be especially challenging, as we may experience all of the emotions of grief arising from current losses compounded by grief and fear for the future, our own and the next generations’.
Hope is a powerful motivator. It lets us anticipate future joy even when our lives in the present are difficult. Despair is defined as “the complete loss or absence of hope.” When we lose hope, we may find ourselves feeling lost and paralyzed. Because despair and hopelessness are such hard emotions, it is hard to find places where they are welcome. Many of us believe that if we feel despair or hopelessness, we must be doing something wrong, so we repress and deny those feelings. When expressions of anguish or despair are silenced, our hearts become deadened, as if a nerve had been cut. Joanna Macy tells us that “we tend to fear that if we consciously acknowledge our despair, we may get mired in it, incapacitated. But despair, like any emotion, is dynamic. Once experienced, it flows through us. It is only our refusal to acknowledge and feel it that keeps it in place.”
The pathway out of despair and hopelessness lies in acknowledging and then radically accepting our pain. Finding spacious places that allow us to feel and express our despair can reopen our hearts. When we recognize and embrace our interconnectedness with each other and the world, we feel the call to engage in acts of care and compassion. We are not alone in our pain. The deep despair we feel at times is actually part of what connects us to other beings (human and nonhuman) who are also suffering from the injustices/troubles of the world.
Ash Sanders wrote, “I wanted a world that would last through the century. I wanted a world where my existence didn’t mean the end of others. But barring that, I really wanted just one thing: to grieve. To say, This is unbearable, and to have people to try to bear it with me.” Bearing it together opens us back up to the possibilities of action that can change the path we are on, individually and collectively. We can open to a hope that is larger than the hopes we’ve carried for specific outcomes, a hope that carries us toward and through collective transformation.