As we contemplate this past year, I’m sharing a vision about hope to carry you forward in this holiday season and beyond. Hope is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.
This is excerpted from a letter written by Nick Cave of The Bad Seeds. You’ve probably heard his most famous song, The Red Right Hand, as the theme song for the show Peaky Blinders or as featured on The X-Files and the original Hellboy movie (2004), which, hello, was a bit obvious since Hellboy has a giant red right hand. The song was inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost where the “red right hand” represents divine vengeance. In 2015, Cave lost his 15-year old son to a fatal accident and wrote this response to a fan who was struggling with cynicism as a young father:
“My early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent.
The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line.
It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people.
It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, and to understand that the world was crying out for help. . . .
It took a devastation to find hope.
Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth.
Hopefulness is not a neutral position.
It’s adversarial.
It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.
Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you’d like, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes keeps the devil down in the hole.
It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending.
It says the world is worth believing in.”
Hope is not a mere passive thought. Rather, hope is an emotional act of strength that we can endure whatever obstacle or cynicism comes our way.
Regardless of where you are in your life, if you are struggling or working towards something that seems insurmountable, know that you have the power to make meaning of your own life and take purposeful action as a warrior of hope. And we are with you in this fight for the greater good.
-Tish and everyone at StartUp Greater Good, PBC and Dodge Legal Group, SPC
P.S. Click here to watch Nick Cave read his full letter here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFM4GVl-WqI
