I want to write about hope, but to be honest, my idea is not fully formed and this is going to be a first pass at an essay I hope to revise in the future.
Hope is an interesting concept, and this word has been floating in and out of my head throughout these past three weeks. I haven’t fully figured out how or why this concept of hope is so important to me, so I want to explore that in more depth.
“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.” — Emily Dickinson
Last year around this time, I took a typography class where my professor gave us an excerpt from Emily Dickinson’s poem, Hope is the Thing with Feathers, and we were asked to incorporate it into our best representation of what hope means to us.
Initially, our professor had asked us to make a tangible representation of hope. I had come back from a trip to Portugal with my family, and had spent many hours looking at the ocean staring at sailboats. I love the water and I love boats, especially sailboats. I like the way the sails ruffle in the wind, and the sound of the water hitting the side of the boat. To me, sailboats and water are the pure embodiment of hope.
When I stood there in Lisbon, staring at the Tagus River which empties into the Atlantic Ocean, I thought about how 500 years ago, Vasco Da Gama was staring at the same body of water, on his sailboat, hopeful for his adventure, an adventure that landed him in my ancestral place of Goa, India. Sure, it is wind that fuels these sailboats, but without hope, many of these sailboats would never have been built, and the world would not have been explored. It is true that many of these expeditions resulted in hundreds of years of unfair colonization, but part of me believes that these expeditions were created out of hope for a new land, and a better life.
When I came back, I took my professor’s prompt, and sat on my bedroom floor with a stack of magazines and an empty piece of paper. Collage is one of my favorite art forms, and I really liked the idea of creating a sailboat out of ripped up pieces of magazine articles. There is something very satisfying for me in the process of ripping up paper and piecing together something new out of something old. I eventually digitized this collage, and added the stanza from Emily Dickinson’s poem.
The cool thing about hope is that it means something different to every person. When we brought in our pieces for a final critique, it was obvious that hope was expressed in countless ways, each with its own strong personality.
In the past few weeks, I’ve realized that hope, as abstract of a concept as it is, has the ability to keep me going. This intangible idea of the future, and all my desires and dreams, keeps me from giving up on things in the present. It is a concept so powerful, that it gets me to do things I never thought I could do.
When I talk about hope like this, it feels like it is another entity that is constantly pestering me to not give up, but what I’ve realized is that hope is an internal process that is defined by my own personal ideas, inspirations and beliefs. In a way, it is kind of scary that you define your own hope, especially in COVID times, when hope seems like a scarcity. Strangely, despite these times being called “hopeless” in the media, if you dig a little deeper, there is more hope than ever before.
Without hope, doctors and nurses would not be going in every day to save patients, and risking their lives for a virus that is so easily contractible. Without hope, Black Lives Matter protestors would not be taking to the streets and demanding change from officials. Hope is the thing that keeps us alive and kicking. It is the thing that peeks its head out of the ground in moments of absolute despair and fights for us to keep on living, and we are responsible for creating that hope.
Again, I don’t know where exactly I was going with the concept of hope, but I know that it is responsible for getting me through a lot. Hope by itself is important, but coupling it with hard work is what makes me productive. I guess what I’m trying to say is that 2020 has been constantly defined as a year of no hope, but I think there is more hope than ever before.
