Staying Awake While Remaining Hopeful

Recently, over lunch with a friend, we were talking about the balance between learning about the many things going wrong with our environment, world, human footprint, etc … and then learning how to appropriately carry the weight of this information with us.

After our conversation, a quick look through a number of different news sources highlighted conflict in various places around the world; the fact that both men and women's fertility is significantly declining over the decades due to chemicals in our environment and food; a(nother) mass shooting; COVID outbreaks in several other countries…just to name a few.

It can be a lot to hold.

One option is to bury our heads in the sand: going off the grid, living in a blissed-out way, happily oblivious to the events of the world. While this feels quite tempting, it might not bring us toward conscious and collective change related to some of our larger societal challenges.

Another option is to try to change all the things, at the same time. The visual here is the person on social media who is constantly reposting, re-sharing, and retweeting about seemingly every single issue - as if virtually shouting, WE MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT ALL OF THESE THINGS AT THIS EXACT MOMENT!!!!!

Arguably, neither sustainable nor terribly effective.

So, what do we do?

How do we stay awake, and also remain hopeful?

This is a complicated question without an easy answer.

That said, here are a few things that might help along the way.

Decide: what are the things that I care about deeply? This likely cannot be all of the things. What is the top cause? The top three? The top five?
Consider: what can I do to take action on the things that I care about most deeply? What is one thing that I can impact, influence, or positively shift in some way?
Connect: start small, start local. Consider opportunities within the community, within the neighborhood, even on the block. Where might we have neighbors hurting right around the corner? How can I connect with people who might have different perspectives or points of view than my own?
Act: do one small thing. We can start with our own actions, our own behaviors, our own choices by considering - what is one small shift that I can make related to this issue? Perhaps this simply means starting by practicing kindness toward others. Perhaps it means picking up the phone to make a call about a topic we feel passionately about, or writing a letter to our representatives. Perhaps it means practicing remembering our cloth bags and bamboo silverware sets in this time of single-use-everything. We can start with the small stuff, and expand from there.

What do you think? How do you hold the balance between staying awake and staying hopeful?