Hope Was Always The Thing!

Welcoming all the tomorrows

Hello again. I took a break last week to move into my London flat. I was overwhelmed with all the things I had to do — setting up bills, getting my broken shower fixed, ordering appliances and furniture. I just needed a break, to let myself feel all the things I needed to feel. I was homesick and confused and stressed out, and not yet healed to the point of reflection. Writing this newsletter has been the joy of my life, but I needed a reminder that feelings aren’t always there to be analyzed. Sometimes they’re just there to be felt.

The UK is a mess. There’s no petrol, my building hasn’t had our rubbish picked up for over a week due to driver shortages from Brexit, and I am afraid to walk alone at night. I have to start thinking about my dissertation, and my plans after graduation, and where I want to be in a year. The future is daunting for young people right now. It’s not a great time to be 21. I am worried and afraid. But I write this on the floor of my empty living room, facing a window displaying a bush of bright red berries, and this morning it was raining but now the sky is blue. I made my first meal in my kitchen, a bowl of vanilla soy yogurt and fruit. Tomorrow I will wake up, maybe to rain, maybe to light, but I will wake up nonetheless. Let’s just start with that. Mary Oliver wrote in “Invitation”: It is a serious thing / just to be alive / on a fresh morning / in this broken world.

This is the second half of a poem I recently came across by Naomi Shihab Nye, titled “Every day as a wide field, every page”:

And there were so many more poems to read!
Countless friends to listen to.
We didn’t have to be in the same room—
the great modern magic.
Everywhere together now.
Even scared together now
from all points of the globe
which lessened it somehow.
Hopeful together too, exchanging
winks in the dark, the little lights blinking.
When your hope shrinks
you might feel the hope of
someone far away lifting you up.
Hope is the thing ...
Hope was always the thing!
What else did we give each other
from such distances?
Breath of syllables,
sing to me from your balcony
please! Befriend me
in the deep space.
When you paused for a poem
it could reshape the day
you had just been living.

On the 23rd of September, the Korean boy group BTS gave a speech at the United Nations general assembly. They spoke about how people in their teens and early twenties are being referred to as COVID’s “Lost Generation, and how a more appropriate term would be “Welcome Generation”. We are constantly adapting to a changing world, which removes the focus on mourning the past and fearing the future, and just focusing on the immediate now. Things like climate doom freak me out because they eliminate the possibility of things getting better. “There are still many pages left in the story about us,” said BTS, “and I think we shouldn’t talk like the ending’s already been written.”

I have been really thankful for my parents this week, who coaxed me through my various adulting breakdowns through WhatsApp messenger and helped me keep my head screwed on. I am thankful for my calls to my best friend back home, Instagram DMs, poems on my Twitter timeline. All this great modern magic in the now. I think about the Italians singing from their balconies, or the daily applause for the NHS, the weekly Zoom yoga classes and the knitting sessions and the book clubs. The pandemic has been terrible in more ways than I can count, but I’m grateful that it has opened up a space for unity and conversation. I don’t have a straight path to a career after graduation, but I don’t think that’s anything to be afraid of. Instead, I feel like we have all exited a dark forest and are facing a large field, drenched in sunshine. Maybe we can just sit there and talk for a while. Any direction from here is still forward.

From “Go the Distance” by Leilei Huang

Danusha Laméris wrote in her poem “Insha’Allah”:

How lightly we learn to hold hope,
as if it were an animal that could turn around
and bite your hand. And still we carry it
the way a mother would, carefully,
from one day to the next.

Further Reading

“I Am Not Ready to Die Yet” by Aracelis Girmay

“Praise The Rain” by Joy Harjo

“Hope and Love” by Jane Hirshfield

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What I Enjoyed The Past Two Weeks

Recent Reads

• Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney. I loved Normal People, and I liked Conversations with Friends, so I had pretty high expectations for this book, which she still managed to surpass. I think this is my favorite of the three. Alice and Eileen’s friendship is incredibly touching and I spent far longer than usual annotating their emails. They ask questions about relationships and history and sex and religion that make you wonder about the state of humanity and where it’s going. It ties into the theme of this newsletter really well — the world has broken and barely healing, but in the end, we still have each other. That’s where the Beautiful World is. I loved it. 5/5

• “October” by Louise Glück. I’ve mentioned this one before, but I revisited it at the end of September to welcome October, which has always been a difficult month for me. It’s a long poem separated into sections. My favorite is IV: This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us. / Surely it is a privilege to approach the end / still believing in something.

Other Wonderful Things

• One of my best friends came to visit me last week from Edinburgh and took me to see my first West End show — Anything Goes at the Barbican. It was so much fun! I have forgotten what a joy it is to experience art while being surrounded by others. I was totally enamored. Thanks, Ian <3

• Phoebe Bridgers’ cover of Bo Burnham’s “That Funny Feeling”. The last bridge is my favorite. All proceeds from the song go to support abortion funds for women in Texas.

• emilymariko on TikTok. I can’t stop watching her videos.

• This song, and this song, and this song.

Hope you all have a great start to October. Thanks for reading.

<3

Tara