Krista Tippett: Welcome to Session 1.

“Hope is a muscle” — what does that mean?

Full confession up front, here — I don’t look back at my life and think that I was born a naturally, effusively optimistic or hopeful person. I think I have become a hopeful person.

But really, what I mean by that is that I’ve seen what hope makes possible in the world. I’ve seen that through the lives of people who have inspired and impressed and emboldened me. I’ve seen that it’s a better way to live, both in terms of the effect a person has on the world around them, but also in how you make a home within yourself.

And I suspect that you have also seen this, in people in your life, in the world around you — the radiance that is there, not every minute of every day, but definingly, in lives of applied hope. These individuals have flexed that muscle of hope so that it has come to define them. And one of my teachers on this, who I am so happy to be able to bring into this course experience, is Bryan Stevenson. He goes farther than calling hope a muscle. He calls it our superpower.

You’re probably familiar in some way with him or his book, Just Mercy, or the movie made about it, and the extraordinary Equal Justice Initiative that he leads. He founded that right out of law school, in 1989, and he has won major legal challenges, including before the Supreme Court, for people on death row, people who are mentally ill and incarcerated, and children being tried as adults. For me, Bryan Stevenson absolutely embodies this notion of hope as a muscle, a practice, a choice — nothing to do with wishful thinking or empty idealism.

The places he works, the people he works with — they have been defined by our society by, as he says, the worst thing they’ve ever done. And this is a tendency in our culture, part of a larger tendency to take what is destructive and failed more seriously than what is redemptive. And I would say that Bryan Stevenson takes both seriously — what is destructive and failed, what is redemptive and life-giving.

And he credits hope as the muscle that makes that possible — in the realities of his life and his family history, which included ancestors who were enslaved, and in the face of the hard and tragic and violent edges of our society and our national history that he’s taken it as his calling to face and help heal.

So in this part of my conversation with Bryan that I’m going to share here, he mentions some extraordinary projects he and the Equal Justice Initiative, EJI, have created in recent years: a museum and a memorial in their city of Montgomery, Alabama, that is drawing people across many of our social chasms and stirring redemptive reckoning around our racial history and present towards the healing of the whole of American society.

This conversation happened in the fall of 2020. And I mentioned the passing of the election of 2020 to him in the sense that I felt at the time — that the election was so galvanizing that it distracted us from the work to be done. We’re leaving that in the clip you’re going to hear, because we are all living in the post-2020 world — now, and for the rest of our lives. So here’s that clip.

Tippett: I’m so relieved that the election is over — I mean, just setting aside the actual details of the election, [laughs] which are significant, but also because I just feel like 2020 — March, April, May, just those months alone — it laid out so much for us to just dig into.

Bryan Stevenson: That’s right, because that’s the other thing I talk about is, you have to be hopeful. And I do think that’s important in this moment, as well, because there’s so much that we see that is dispiriting.

We do these web articles at EJI. We post stuff, and we do a daily calendar thing. And I was just working on one today, about some of these comments by law enforcement officers over the last couple of weeks, and I just find it heartbreaking. We had a police officer in Alabama say, “Join me. I’m going to Washington. I’m gonna shoot Democrats. I’m gonna kill these socialists, and we’re not gonna leave any survivors.” And some of this rhetoric — there was a police officer in Wilmington, North Carolina, that welcomed a war, and he couldn’t wait to kill Black people. And you read some of this stuff, and it’s so disheartening to imagine that we have people who carry those kinds of sentiments in positions like that.

But I do think it’s important that we stay hopeful about our capacity to overcome that bigotry. And I am persuaded that hopelessness is the enemy of justice, that if we allow ourselves to become hopeless, we become part of the problem. I think you’re either hopeful, or you’re the problem. There’s no neutral place. Injustice prevails where hopelessness persists. And if I’ve inherited anything from the generation who came before me, I have inherited their wisdom about the necessity of hope.

Tippett: I think you meant “justice prevails where hopefulness persists.” Is that what you …

Stevenson: Injustice prevails —

Tippett: Injustice prevails where hopelessness — yes, OK.

Stevenson: [laughs] It’s a lawyerly way of saying something that should be said a lot — but I say it that way only because we’ve been dealing with injustice in so many places for so long. And if you try to dissect why is this still here, it’s because people haven’t had enough hope and confidence to believe that we can do something better.

I think hope is our superpower. Hope is the thing that gets you to stand up when others say, “Sit down.” It’s the thing that gets you to speak when others say, “Be quiet.” I never met a lawyer until I got to Harvard Law School. I had the hope I could be something I’d actually never seen anybody like me be. We built this museum and memorial — I didn’t know anything about museums and memorials, but I had this kind of idea that we could create a space that might be a truth-telling space that might help people reckon with this past. And because we had this hope — even starting an organization like this in a place like this, it didn’t make sense if there wasn’t a hope dynamic pushing you.

And I think we have to have that. I get worried when I meet hopeless teachers or hopeless lawyers or hopeless politicians or hopeless advocates. Those are people who are not going to help us advance justice in the world.”

[music]

Tippett: “Hopelessness is an enemy of justice.” And to turn that around, hope is a friend to justice. And also, what Bryan describes — hope is an act of imagination, a leap of imagination that has real world consequences.

And so I think — the reason I wanted to put this first for this course is that I think that it’s a wonderful way into the question that so many of us have been asking, so many of us across all of our divides and differences, which is, seeing the reckonings that are upon us, seeing the repair that we want to happen in our world, that needs to happen in our world — how to begin? And each and every one of us asking individually, how do I begin, what do I do?

And I might be worried about that “superpower” language because I think one thing that we do with virtues and with virtuous people is we put them up on pedestals where what they’re describing and modeling feels inaccessible to the lowly rest of us. But there’s no pedestal here, if you know what Bryan Stevenson’s first counsel is when people ask him, “How do I live this way you live?” How do I develop this muscular hope that is also so pragmatic and that shifts things in the world? And his counsel is: “Get proximate.” Find a way to get proximate to the people in your neighborhoods, your communities, the places where you work, the places where you live — the people who are marginalized, who are excluded.

So he’s talking about physical proximity, but what he’s also describing is this connection that is always there with deep ways of living and being, with virtues and moves of character — that what we do externally also involves inward preparation and settling. So getting proximate also means getting spiritually proximate. And how do you do that? You get mentally and emotionally present to things that perhaps you haven’t noticed or gotten up close to before. You get curious, which is just this very quiet muscle, this quiet virtue that makes almost all of the other virtues more possible.

The invitation to practice here, in our first session of this course, is to take Bryan Stevenson’s counsel to become proximate into your mind, into your body. Walk around with it. Walk around with it and see what it does inside you, and see what it moves you to see and to do in the world that you can see and touch. That’s the first place, the primary place, any of us are called to be present, for our presence to matter.

That’s what we’ll work with in the Pause ritual. Listen to the Pause every day this week, 2-4 minutes, return to it as often as you’d like. Carry its reflections and questions into your journaling and your life to keep grounding this counsel to become proximate and note what that works in you.

And if you’re interested in the optional deeper Delve of Part 3, you’ll learn more about Bryan Stevenson and how this wisdom of proximity was imparted to him, how his muscle of hope developed. And really, again, what’s so accessible about this — and hope-giving — is that it happened one experience, one new observation, one act at a time. And you also hear how he has been able — and I think this is a result of living this way — not just to see new possibilities and ways of being present and realities that form how he moves through the world, but to find beauty, as he says, in places where people think beauty can’t exist. But you don’t see that unless you open yourself to that experience.

Thank you for being here. And I will see you next time.