Hope as a Discipline, Not a Feeling

We are living in a time when despair can feel like the most honest response. The headlines are relentless. The losses, personal and global, compound. For many of us, especially those whose work is rooted in justice, equity, and community, there is a heaviness that sits just beneath the surface—persistent, exhausting, and familiar. 

In moments like these, the idea of hope can feel naive, even offensive. As if to hope means to ignore the grief, the injustice, the sheer weight of it all. 

But what if hope isn’t a feeling? What if it’s not about being optimistic or cheerful or even confident that things will improve? 

What if hope is a discipline? 

I return often to the words of Mariame Kaba, the abolitionist and organizer, who reminds us: “Hope is a discipline.” Not a fleeting emotion, but a practice. A muscle we strengthen through intentional, often unglamorous choices. Through showing up, again and again, for the work of healing, building, imagining. 

Hope as a discipline means we act not because we are certain of the outcome, but because we are committed to the possibility of something better. 

It means: 

• Speaking truth in rooms where silence would be safer.
• Creating beauty even in places where it may not be recognized.
• Investing in young people who will carry forward dreams we may never see realized.
• Loving each other fiercely, even when the world teaches us to harden.
  

I think of the facilitators holding space for people in pain. The parents trying to raise kind children in a chaotic world. The organizers who keep gathering, even when the crowd is small. The teachers who keep teaching, even when systems fail them. 

All of it—hope in action. 

For me, practicing hope looks like lighting candles. Gathering people for honest conversation. Naming truth, even when it shakes the room. Listening to my son’s questions about death and offering no easy answers—but sitting with him, fully present, in the asking. 

Hope doesn’t mean pretending things are fine. It means not giving up, even when they’re not. 

It means we keep creating, tending, resisting, loving. 

  We keep imagining. 

  We keep showing up. 

Because the alternative—numbness, cynicism, detachment—is a luxury we cannot afford. 

Hope is a discipline. 

And in practicing it, we give each other reason to keep going.