When the shoots of spring seem so far away
Share this article:
Interesting isn’t it, the way that the days start to get longer once the shortest day of 21st December has passed here in the UK. It’s only noticeable when the sky is clear. Dour cloudy days don’t do it.
Today was a balmy and sunny sort of winter day – and it was possible to just about imagine spring even though it is still many days away. In the early hours of this morning I heard a robin singing outside the window, singing into the darkness – willing it to be lighter sooner. Not a winter sound, something that reminded me that there will be light beyond COVID. And yes, of course there is darkness, there are deaths every day, there is government incompetence on a monumental scale. A scandal that must wait until the crisis is easing.
But there is also the service and support that people offer each other, the hope of seeing beyond this.
I guess when the Second World War began, everyone thought it would be over by Christmas, and each year ground on, despair and apparent lack of hope. But hope – keeping hope, that is what we need. Hope isn’t an empty deluded emotion. Apparently those filled with the early feelings of hope in the concentration camps were the ones that didn’t survive. Those that made it combined purpose with a hope that was realistic about the situation.
Last year, Meg Wheatley did an online talk where she talked about the illusion of Hope, stressing the parlous state of the world, the need to appreciate that we are at the end of times. I struggle to agree with this point, but I guess she wanted us to wake up to the reality that we face. Maybe that lack of hope is true in a cataclysmic sense where the climate is becoming irreparably damaged and we face the endless questing for economic growth which will ultimately destroy us.
But surely we still need the hope that gets us up in the morning, the hope that builds connections with others (even if it is on Zoom). We need the hope that keeps us creating, keeps us curious for learning, keeps us listening and loving. For that is the human condition.