At 11:40am on Tuesday morning, I received a message from one of my favourite people. It was Patti Andrews and she’d sent me a video of her daughter, GoGo, along with the words, “I thought you might enjoy this mood”. GoGo is also one of my favourite people because she wants to live on Mars and wears a t-shirt stating, ‘Nobody’s Perfekt’. As her mother says, she is a force. In this video, my favourite four-year-old sits cross-legged on an expansive beach with the backdrop of grey skies and gum trees. With not a soul around but her mother to hear, GoGo scream-sings the ballad, “SO ANNOYING, SO ANNOYING, SO AH-NOY-YINGGGGGGGGGGGGGG.” It was directed at her brother who had allegedly been helping her dig a hole. He was wisely no longer present. After GoGo scream-sang those words with the conviction of Beyoncé and the freedom of Lizzo, she performed three horizontal sand throws followed by the - not to be missed - vertical double sand throw. With the double, she wore a Cheshire Cat Grin that said I-have-nothing-left-to-lose-so-take-that-Mum. It was everything. I did not just enjoy her mood. I was already with her. It mirrored my mood and possibly the country’s mood and possibly the world’s mood, because the past month has, if anything, been SO AH-NOY-YINGGGGGGGGGGGGGG.
I began the pandemic holding on to the silver lining of wholesomeness. If I were stuck inside, I thought, I could meditate twice daily, finally develop a significant yoga habit, and rearrange the house. Now all I want to do is go to a gig and complain about other people’s sweat on me. The second wave of the coronavirus (or something close to it) has brought with it both a sense of hedonism and hopelessness. We are finally coming to terms with the reality that this thing isn’t going away anytime soon and all we want to do is throw sand in the air. So it is probably time we discussed the discipline of hope, which brings me to Jia Tolentino and Mariame Kaba. In an interview with Interview Magazine last week, Tolentino - a New Yorker staff writer and author - was asked what prevents her from giving up hope in the human race. “I don’t feel that I have the right to consider giving up hope,” she replied. “To do so would mean abandoning or failing to recognize the work that’s being done—the strikes that are being organized, the doctors and nurses who are keeping people alive and fighting to get their patients out of prison, the millions of people who have had to risk their lives and go to work in the pandemic regardless of whether they have hope or not.” She continued: “I appreciate Mariame Kaba’s idea that hope is a discipline. It’s a choice—it can’t be a matter of fluctuating affect, whatever viral news story or TikTok gave you hope in people or took it away.”
Mariame Kaba is an organiser and educator whose work focuses on racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder of Project NIA - an organisation working to end youth incarceration - and is most often attributed to coining the phrase, ‘hope is a discipline’. However, she originally heard the phrase from a nun. In a podcast interview with Beyond Prisons, Kaba explained a nun had mentioned the phrase in conjunction with making sure our existences “were of the world and in the world”. That our inner lives weren’t existing in isolation to the world around us, that we were aware of and contributing to the world we lived in. “The hope that she was talking about was this grounded hope that was practiced everyday,” Kaba said. “I heard that many years ago and thought, ‘Oh my god, that speaks to me as a philosophy of living: that hope is a discipline and we have to practice it every single day.’ Because in the world that we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that nothing is going to change, ever.” The organiser understands why people feel the aforementioned, but she chooses to think differently and act differently despite the presence of other emotions. “Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense,” she said. “Hope isn’t an emotion and hope isn’t optimism.” It is maybe best defined, Kaba explained, by a quote from liberal evangelical Jim Wallis: “Hope is really believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change.”
And in the end, what choice do we have but to walk through our days with hope? The alternative is to stand still or go backwards, which leaves us either stagnant or devolved. I don’t think this means we can’t throw some sand in the air every now and then. If hope is a discipline and not an emotion, we can still go through the motions of feeling all the rest. As GoGo’s sartorial choices state, ‘Nobody’s Perfekt’. Sometimes you need to scream-sing ‘SO AH-NOY-YINGGGGGGGGGGGGGG’ into the ether on an expansive beach in order to keep going and keep hoping things will, indeed, get better. In order to take another step forward and eventually watch the evidence change. To choose anything but hope right now is to fail those who are doing much tougher work on the frontlines, those among us who don’t have the time to think about whether this moment is worthy of hope or not. We must choose it for them. However, the words that I have not been able to get out of my head this week are the final two lines from Tolentino’s answer. “In general,” she concludes, “I try to expect nothing and hope that everything is possible. I want the courage to need very little and demand a lot.” I hope, by the end of this, more of us can adopt that mindset.
Some related (and unrelated) recommendations:
Obviously, this Jia Tolentino interview from Interview Magazine's series, 'Ask A Sane Person'.
If you haven't seen InStyle's latest cover, please take a look. The magazine interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci and his wife of 35 years, bioethicist Dr. Christine Grady about their marriage, their daughters, and Dr. Fauci's relationship with President Trump.
This excerpt from Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman's new book, Big Friendship. They are the hosts of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, and you can listen to a recent episode where they interview Mariame Kaba here. Aminatou is one of the nicest people I've ever met.
This phenomenal and vulnerable Vulture interview with actress Thandie Newton.
This week Tara June Winch won the 2020 Miles' Franklin award for her novel, The Yield. Add it to your reading list. As Astrid Edwards pointed out, two First Nations women in a row have now won the award and, overall, four women in row.
It's been raining for almost a week here in Sydney, so I've done yoga twice now. I use SkyTing, which is a New York-based studio that has an excellent online membership program. It's fairly cheap and offers shorter sessions (25 mins etc) that still work.
I've had DMA's new album on repeat. I'm sure GoGo has as well.
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