This is a post about the non-slogan-y kind of hope and change

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Here’s a story from a few months ago that is still clinging to me. It’s not something that needs sense-making — it’s pretty pure and explicable. Which will be, I guess, one of the points of this whole post.

Out on a nighttime walk, I caught a glimpse of an animal on the other side of the street. A fox. Not a rare sighting by any stretch in this neck of the literal and metaphorical woods. But what she did was pretty out of the norm. Which was: after a few paces, she took a seat beneath some trees. Far enough away that I could barely make her out, but not so far that I wouldn’t expect her to run away instead. But she didn’t run. She stayed. And when I passed by, she stayed where she was, watching. Almost completely still.

And honestly, I was overjoyed by this quiet encounter. Weird how that works. Being something of a novelty-seeker, I always expect to be taken by feelings like this in more dopamine- or adrenaline-inciting situations. Not as much in a gentle moment of something only slightly expected.

But maybe when you’re constantly in the thick of buzz and bells and whistles screaming for your attention, big loud extraordinary circus-style shit feels…mundane. Beige. Flat. Even boring.

I’d like to think one could opt out of that noise. Sometimes it seems possible. Like during a long hike or walk sans phone, or a flat surf session where you’re only bobbing on the water and listening to the ocean and not doing much else. But as soon as there were radios, there were advertisements; headlines go hand-in-hand with newspapers. Something always wants, even needs, attention. It’s so much work to mete it out.

But then, it’s so little work to turn a different direction, look a little closer, and be nothing short of astounded. Graced.

This feels like a familiar topic for this space. This post about awe and mountains might be the closest thing – similar though not the same. Because, mountains are not ordinary. Maybe they feel that way to people who live on and around them. But even then, can they ever be? If you had an otherworldly something living in your backyard, would it ever get old?

Okay, possibly. Lots of people live near oceans and never go to them. But what I’m getting at is the idea that some things are both astonishing and subtle at the same time. Quietly imbuing life with meaning in ways you could have never anticipated, when you always thought — assumed — meaning and hope and change would come crashing in like a tidal wave.

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This could easily be pared down to being about “living simply and appreciating moments.” And while I’m not saying it isn’t about that, it’s more so about a better life being something that’s built through simplicity, and persistence, moment by moment.

How about another metaphorical story? Recently, my dad turned a tired-looking screened-in patio into something truly refreshing and beautiful. Terracotta tiles, soft white paint on the brick walls, a hardcore power wash. It took weeks. Each day, it looked slightly different. And now, mere weeks later, it’s transformed. It’s kind of a marvel. But it wasn’t this huge sweeping one-and-done thing, and he didn’t do it alone. Which is, in turn, how change usually works: in a very ordinary, gradual way. This truth isn’t always easy to digest, or to express in a compelling way. Yet it is true, and it’s powerful.

Recently, this post by Daniel Hopewell floated across my instagram feed, and I thought he captured this idea brilliantly:

“You see it all the time — someone cuts a blunt fringe, books a weekend in Lisbon, splurges on expensive bedsheets and calls it growth. Tiny upgrades to trick the nervous system into thinking it’s still alive. And maybe it works — for a night or two. But by Sunday, the dread creeps back in. The job still kills them. The dream’s still on life support. So it goes. It’s easier to burn sage than to burn your life down, so they rearrange furniture and light candles like it’s ritual, not avoidance. We are the architects of our own dreams — but most people build prisons, then decorate them.

“Everyone talks about growth. But nobody talks about the quiet ways we avoid it. The burnout masked as self-care. The Sunday dread. The rituals we call healing that are just keeping us stuck.

“A post about change. Or fear. Or both.”

Sometimes, I find this easy to forget. And that would already be the case, being, you know, a novelty-seeker to the nth and more big-picture than detail-oriented. Then on top of that, essentially everything makes it easy to forget this, too – the whole cultural collective of novelty-seeking/big-picture-thinking/pursuits-of-happiness. Forgetting is probably a common problem. You would think that’s in stark contrast to the Puritan work ethic thing, but then, maybe it isn’t at all, because that ethos isn’t necessarily about moving towards a sense of purpose or something satisfying. It’s work for work’s sake. Which loops right back into how, of course, Americans love intensity and bigness and bombast. It’s all just part of the package.

That’s not to deem any of this bad or wrong, per se. It all just is. But sometimes it seems there’s nowhere for it to truly go, because it exists to hide other things. The American dream — the classic one, anyway — is this super-perfect portrait where nothing is out of place. It looks Super Great to everyone around, never mind any extremes it might have taken to get there. Including, for example, fear.

Fear being woven into this journey is easy to forget, too. Maybe that portrait looks so fantastic only to cover up a fear of being nothing, having nothing, disappearing. Missing out both now and forever.

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For most of my life, I’ve wanted a different dream. I think it’s become clear that a lot of people have, and are ready to express as much. It’s one filled with these everyday joys and amazements. Not one lacking moments of big excitement, chaos, joy, and adventure, of course. But one built with the knowledge that those energies cannot be the frame that holds up everything else. I think there’s something healing about understanding and embracing that idea. And not just on an individual level.

Recently I read a piece from Big Think about “everyday enlightenment.” It takes this idea a step further, to a truly sublime place. The article — an interview with Robert Waldinger, Zen priest and Harvard professor — quotes him as saying:

“Enlightenment is about ‘waking up to the truth of what life is. More specifically, the interconnectedness of everything, the essential oneness of everything.’ He adds, however, that the Zen tradition discourages thinking of enlightenment as a self-improvement project. As such, we would be better served to think of ‘everyday enlightenment’ as those activities that reduce feelings of isolation and loneliness in others and our communities.”

The truth of what life is. Such a massive phrase. And yet it’s only about remembering that all of us are interconnected. Someone like Waldinger probably finds it both profound and simple – which, it is. What a clarifying perspective, too – that the big, meaningful things of life live in small gestures. People do seem to feel that when it happens, and notice when it’s missing.

Maybe that’s presumptuous, and yet I’ve heard and read so many comments and pieces lately to the tune of, “Americans are wealthier than ever. Why are they so depressed? Why is there so little ‘gross national happiness’?

Well…if you want to get semantic there’s the question of what actually constitutes wealth. And the fact that many people feel (or are!) economically insecure in spite of those levels of wealth. One could also dig into Daniel Kahneman’s work on emotional well-being and wealth and really nerd out about that research.

But besides that, it seems like the outlets posing this specific question have missed a really fundamental lesson about being alive. Yes, it’s true that a certain level of income makes you happier, because you’re not scrambling to survive — to breathe and keep your head above proverbial water, or a literal roof over it. I would never deny that, having earned a wide variety of different incomes in different jobs and felt a wide swath of complex emotions and reactions about all of it. The thing is, yes, money matters, and money helps you survive, but how hard is it to see by now that it doesn’t erase loneliness, or automatically imbue your life with connection and meaning? Is that part of why Anora won Best Picture this year? Because of an attempt to grapple with that truth?

As a sidenote, that’s all meant to imply on a deeper level of being. I want to stay far away from Horatio Alger-esque proselytizing – there’s enough real, cyclical poverty in the U.S., and there’s no reason to overlook that. Furthermore, yes, money and success can help you find ways to deal with some of these things, i.e. get a good therapist or move to a place where you find people you get along with. To swing back to the metaphor about the patio, terracotta tiles cost money, so there’s that.

So what is the point, if not that? One is, on a cultural level, it really has not clicked into place that the wealth of a nation, if not applied well — to things like sustainability and community and mental health — can only go so far. Which is, of course, more of a philosophical argument than a logistical or policy-oriented one. But those latter kinds of arguments do have to get their start somewhere.

Of course, I don’t know how to influence a system enough to get it to embrace humanity more. Apparently that’s the latest million dollar question. (Although, seems to be a hell of a lot more money in influencing social dynamics to the point of getting people to embrace their humanity less.)

One possible way could be through an interesting trend I’ve noticed — that of “third places” getting renewed circulation. There’s been a major uptick in mentions, both online and in conversations (and in how spaces describe themselves, natch!). It was only within the past few months I learned that the term came from a book called The Great Good Place. It’s on the list – I’ve yet to start it – but I’ve been digging Karen Christensen’s (one of its writers, along with Ray Oldenberg, who coined the term “third place”) work in the meantime.

Anyway, consider why this is surging at this moment. Likely because it’s this example of something simple and seemingly ordinary that makes life so much richer, and gives back more than one could ever expect. It’s a way to live out and demonstrate that humanity matters. Not by forcing it to matter, or planting seeds of it in ways that would just let it die. Rather, by way of giving it space to bloom and blossom and grow. Actually cultivating it, making it into something tangible.

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It would be in line with my other posts to bring in ways this is happening elsewhere, and how it’s working for people, making their lives better, et cetera/ad nauseam. But I’m not sure it’s fitting for this one, given the whole ~uncharted territory~ thing. Yes, I’ve been thinking a lot about where the country I live is headed, and some days are better than others. (Internally and externally. I try keep up with the better news as much as the worse.)

The one thought that keeps circling back is, if there’s something integral to your culture that is possibly killing it, will extricating it save that culture? Or turn it into something new? Is that how it works? Or does that result in its death? (Which, if it does, is that such a bad thing?) Does it need to be replaced with something better first?

Given the new-territory thing, it seems everyone is heading towards discovering what the answers to these questions could possibly be.

Recently, I read John Paul Brammer’s substack for the first time (courtesy of the Mash-Up Americans). And though it was new to me, the notes of the column in question, “What Am I Supposed to Do?”, were familiar and resonant. Not just because the bottom line is to, in the face of overwhelming grief toward cartoonishly evil deeds (I don’t think I need to cite those deeds for you to get which ones I mean), embrace the things that make you human. Even, including, especially feeling small. But that was the part that stopped me dead, and showed me a moment of relief — even a new way of thinking.

“I would go so far as to say that you feel small because you are small. I, too, am small. The rich and powerful men you mention are small as well, even if they’re desperately trying to convince themselves otherwise. To be human is to be small. Fundamental to the religion of the oligarchs is the notion that this fact can be transcended through man-made hierarchies that place a select few above the many. Their obsession with AI, with colonizing Mars, and with forcing the masses to adore them is all downstream of this denial of their own humanity, part and parcel of their desire to be something different, something better, something bigger than the rest of us.”

Ordinary humanity, in the end, is what makes life extraordinary. That thought is not new territory by any stretch. One of the most compelling treatises on it I’ve found lately is Rebecca Solnit’s fantastic Hope in the Dark. This book of essays is about twenty years old now, and yet it rings so pertinent and true today. And as early on as the introduction (a new one, but still, from 2014) she ties this in:

“If there is one thing we can draw from where we are now and where we were then [in 2005], it is that the unimaginable is ordinary, that the way forward is almost never a straight line you can glance down but a convoluted path of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.”

Her words as well as Brammer’s speak to a possible reality I’ve been feeling in my being, sensing in my mind, hoping is next for the many of us — in the West, especially, though maybe elsewhere. It is this possibility of creating a stronger sense of community, and thereby a much stronger one of humanity. That’s something I’ve heard so many other people speak to as well. And while it might not look like it right now, what Solnit captures so eloquently is that it doesn’t have to look like it’s happening yet for it to be happening. Each of us just has to engage, and trust that doing so actually matters – because it does. Change churns beneath the surface before it bursts forth, surprising everyone except those who were putting in the work.

And sure, while this is all in the realm of possibility right now, I’ve got the sense that remembering this might the only way out of this inflection point. Every other possibility is likely to go in a direction that would emphasize more of the same. Which, it’s apparent, most people do not truly want.

There’s a hollowness to the traditional American dream because it skips over this. It’s all about having, getting, securing. There’s a little bit of family sprinkled in there. But I love the idea of a different dream taking shape — one that takes the positive qualities of Americanness like unfettered optimism and a can-do nature, and finds their purest essence. Like real honest hope and determination and grit. For the purpose of everyone. That’s empowerment. That’s real freedom. I’d like to see it happen. Time will tell if it can be so — if it’s the thing that’s better than a dream. If it’s the extraordinary potential of taking ordinary steps forward.

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More recently than the fox encounter, another animal sighting gave me pause in an entirely different way.

Have you ever seen a white deer? This was my first. A rainy evening, a drive on a windy road, a glimpse of regular-colored deer in the nearby woods. And then, a flash of white. I was, for lack of a better word, stoked. Thinking, well, of course they existed, but I’d never had the chance to see one before! How rare are they? How does that happen? (I looked it up later and apparently it’s leucism, not albinism like you might guess.)

That wasn’t ordinary. Or, it was, but an extraordinary version of it. Maybe that’s the best metaphor for what I’m looking for, and what this greater longing might be for, too. An evolution. Transformation. A variation on the norm. A way to take the same values that have served as foundational, and express them in stark, interesting, meaningful new ways.

And that starts on an individual level. So I’m more than happy to work towards something like that. It’s worth the work, to get to live in a state of hope, rather than in one of nihilistic despair, drained dry. Maybe from that would come the kind of hope that could be passed along, too, and speak to what’s honestly possible.

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photo credits: Stanislav Lvovsky / @halfofthesky; Antón Jáuregui / @antonjau