synonyms for hope
what if hope is synonymous with belonging?
We’ve been taught and told to think of our bodies in specific ways, aligned with specific narratives. In choosing alternative stories, we can infuse mundane moments, like taking a breath or considering a heartbeat, with awe and curiosity. These stories offer us alternatives from the dominant storylines of constant productivity, and even from the hamster wheel of hope of a better future. That last part, the release of hope, is a difficult one, steeped as we are in these stories of industry that tell us a brighter tomorrow is always coming. I do not wish to imply that we should lose all hope and fall into doubt and pessimism. But the ticket price for hope as it is typically offered is a lack of presence to the way things are, and a projection onto some brighter future, out beyond this mess. We’ll be better, it will be better, things will be better…someday. When we drop the stories that speak of constant improvement, whether that’s from losing some weight or reaching a certain income level or even attaining more altruistic goals and visions of a better future, we come home to this moment, where life is happening. A vision for the future is important, but it can’t come at the expense of reckoning with the present. …. So rather than hope, these are stories of awe and curiosity, as hope’s more present, grounded cousins.
-from Returning Home to Our Bodies: Reimagining the Relationship between Our Bodies and the World; Practices for Connecting Somatics, Nature, and Social Change. North Atlantic Books, 2024.
When I tour with Returning Home to Our Bodies, I am always grateful when someone in the audience asks how my thinking has changed since the book’s release. In a way, a book is like a photograph of thoughts: static and unchanging, while life continues beyond the frame, and my thoughts have grown and developed in the time since I finished the manuscript.
Each time I am asked the question of what has changed the most in my thinking since writing Returning Home to Our Bodies, I am struck that some of the most significant changes have been in my thoughts about hope.
Hope is a word used so frequently it begins to be weightless. When I was working on the manuscript, I was pushing against the way hope seems to so often be used as a way to escape the present. But since I wrote the paragraph above, hope now occupies a different place in my internal compass.
When I wrote that paragraph, the continent of Australia was on fire, the global slide into neofascism was gaining ground, and houses here in the northeast of the US where I grew up were being bought in cash for tens of thousands over asking price by people fleeing the regularity of fire season in California. Priced out of homes in my hometown, I was living in my high school bedroom, writing my first manuscript on my high school desk, mourning a fresh heartbreak and severely doubting my ability to fulfill this dream of writing a book in any way that mattered. All of that contributed to my feelings about hope. Better to be grounded, I thought. Better to release hope and be here in the mucky mess of living, and search for beauty wherever it can be found in the present.
And I still think that, in some ways. But when the book came out, I was no longer writing to imaginary people in my bedroom. The heartbreak healed, as it always does. My family made part of the house into an apartment, and we settled into multigenerational family living, and I still write on my high school desk. Eventually a new love began, one that is changing me in soft and beautiful ways, and I suppose it’s impossible to be changed by love and not reconsider hope.
Now I talk with people around the country and around the world about these ideas. And a question that keeps coming from these curious, engaged audiences is a question about hope. Do you really feel that way? they ask. Is hope really something that should be left aside?
Yesterday I was invited to a virtual bookclub about Returning Home to Our Bodies. And yesterday, in the umpteenth conversation I have had about hope since the book came out last winter, I realized that perhaps the issue is that when a word is used as often as hope (and as often as love, but we’ll save that for a different post) then part of gaining clarity and returning necessary weight to the word, requires we align the word with its appropriate synonyms.
And among what I am sure are many contenders, I think hope has two possible synonyms, and they lead us in two very different directions.
Hope can be a synonym for fear, as in: I am afraid this will happen, and so I hope that it doesn’t.
I am afraid the sea levels will rise, I hope they don’t. I am afraid of getting sick, I hope I don’t. I am afraid of something happening to me or my partner, I hope it doesn’t. I am afraid of ICE coming for my neighbors, I hope they don’t. And on and on. Understandable hopes. Hopes I have. But when hope is synonymous with fear, it weakens the word and pulls us out of the present. These hopes seem to be looped onto some ambiguous God, or some unknown “other” who will in some way prevent these fears from coming true. This is the hope I was writing about in the paragraph above, the hope I was rejecting, turning instead to a practice of awe and curiosity.
But hope can also be a synonym for belonging. This hope is alive. This hope strengthens.
I belong to a future where we care for each other, I hope we all live to see this. I belong to a future where all people are safe in their homes and in the streets, I hope we live to see this. I belong to a future where all people are free to love who they love and live in their most liberated expression, I hope we live to see this. I belong to a future where the lands and waters are protected, and the more-than-human world is honored as teachers and kin, I hope we live to see this.
And because I belong to this future, then I have a responsibility to plant the seeds of this future wherever I can, seeds of hope that bring life to this future here in the present. So I take as many preventative measures as I can to care for my health, not in the twisted ways of MAHA eugenics, but because tending the health of my own individual body helps me tend to my family and my community. I contact local immigrant and trans rights organizations so I can work with my communities to keep us safer. I check on my neighbors. I shop locally and use cash, not just on boycott days but every chance I can, because I belong to a future where we support our neighbors and chat about the weather as we buy a book or a bag of rice. I remember the adage of Reduce, Repair, Reuse, and only then Recycle, and I find creative ways to get what I need and share what I have. I plant enough food to share, I learn how to best tend to the forest I live in. I give my attention to the migration routes of songbirds, I give my attention to the reaching limbs of the trees, and the first flowers after the cold winter.
That’s hope. At least as I’m thinking about it now.
These thoughts come alive in conversation, and so please do feel free to comment here. And in the coming weeks I’ll be announcing some virtual book talks so that if you have read Returning Home to Our Bodies - or even if you’ve just thought about reading it - and would like to talk with me, we can do that. I belong to a future where we talk with each other, not just at each other in these internet forums, so that’s one of the ways I am hoping for that future as well.
