August 17th, 2026

There are times when not only
the future, but the present, seems bleak: few realize how radically transformed the world we live in is, a world transformed not only by nightmares such as global warming and global capitalism, but also by dreams of freedom and justice - and transformed by things we could never have dreamed of... We need to hope for the realization of our dreams, but also to recognize a world that will remain even more wild than our imagination

Rebecca Solnit

Reality Didn't Wait for My Permission

I have been sitting with an essay by Rebecca Solnit this week, about hope. Not the manufactured kind.

She does not flinch from the nightmare — the warming world, the machinery of capital that grinds without conscience, all of it named plainly. But she holds something else alongside it. History, in her telling, does not move in a straight line. It lurches. It has been upended before by forces no one saw coming — chains broken, walls come down, movements rising out of rooms that looked, from the outside, like nothing was happening in them.

I have started to think this is not just a theory of history. I think it is a theory of how a person stays sane.

~

Despair always arrives wearing the costume of realism.

It says: I have seen enough of the pattern to know how this ends. It sounds like clear sight. It is actually a narrowing — a mind deciding it has already gathered all the evidence it will ever need, and closing the file.

That narrowing is not peace. It only looks like peace, the way a locked room looks like safety. I have lived inside that room. It is quiet in there, but it is not sane.

~

In recovery, we say that sanity is the thing we are restored to, not the thing we arrive with. I used to hear that as a private confession about the damage of drinking. I hear it differently now.

Sanity is what returns when I stop insisting I already know how the story ends. The moment I loosen that grip — on the outcome, on my own certainty — something in my chest unclenches that has been clenched for years.

That unclenching is the peace. Not the absence of trouble. The absence of the need to have already solved it.

~

There was a version of me who could not have imagined the life I am living now — not the reconciliation still being written, not the years of quiet mornings, not the absence of the old hunger that used to sit at the center of every day. If someone had described this life to me then, I would have called it wishful.

I would have been wrong.

Reality did not wait for my permission to exceed what I could picture, and it did not do it in the direction I feared.

~

The Gnostics had a word for the territory outside our small maps: pleroma — the fullness. In their telling, the demiurge, a lesser god, believes his workshop is the whole of creation and mistakes the limits of his sight for the limits of the world.

Despair does the same thing. It assumes that what I can currently see is all there is to see.

And yet even in the Gnostic myth, rupture becomes generative. The fall opens something. The world is never sealed shut, not even in its most broken telling.

~

So this is where I am landing: hope is not a mood I am waiting to feel. It is a discipline, the same as any other step in recovery — practiced deliberately, on the days it does not come naturally, because the practice itself is what keeps the mind sound.

And it is not passive. Solnit is not describing a hope that sits and waits for the wildness to arrange itself into something kind. The dreams she names — the end of slavery, the fall of apartheid — were fought for by people who could not see the ending from where they stood. They acted inside the not-knowing instead of waiting for it to resolve.

That is the part I keep returning to. Hope is not certainty about the future. It is what makes it possible to keep showing up for one — especially the parts of it I am still helping to build with my own hands. A letter. An amends. A morning lived differently than the one before it.

~

I do not know what tomorrow holds for the people I love, for the earth we are all standing on.

I have stopped treating that as a wound.

It is only the shape of being alive in a world wilder than anything I could have dreamed up on my own. And I am coming to believe that the sanest thing I can do inside that wildness — the thing that actually makes a better future more likely rather than less — is to keep hoping anyway. On purpose. As a practice.

And let that practice be the ground I stand on instead of the certainty I used to demand.