Where do I direct my curiosity and care? Where have I not been looking?

Remember: curiosity, listening, and presence — proximity that is spiritual as much as physical — is a first step before setting an action plan.

This Wisdom Practice is 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. Seeing the reckonings that are upon us, seeing the repair that we want to happen in our world — how to begin?

The language of hope as a “superpower” could be problematic; one thing we do with virtues and with virtuous people is to 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? 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.

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. Getting proximate also means getting spiritually proximate. 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 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.

What shifts when I get curious about the difference between critical thinking, cynicism, and hope?

Notice in your day when “hope inspires the good to reveal itself.”

Maria Popova offers an invitation to practice that is akin to the practice of the previous session. It’s another move towards getting proximate: “What do I agree to attend to and notice?”

Another muscle suggested by Maria is to interrogate yourself when you have a cynical reaction, and wonder how you might be protecting yourself with that reaction. It is, after all, a reaction you may have been trained to have. Is there a different move you could make, even just flexing that muscle of curiosity that lives so close to the muscle of hope?

That Emily Dickinson line that comes to us through Anne Lamott is also such a gift here: “Hope inspires the good to reveal itself.” If you’re going through your days practicing hope, notice when that happens — when an orientation of hope inspires the good to reveal itself.

Is there a hope I’m holding onto that gets in the way of taking in the full reality of things?

Practice tonglen in the face of news or an experience you can hardly bear. Breathe in the pain, and breathe out healing.

“The hope that suffering will go away if I don’t look at it — that’s the wrong kind of hope.”

How is just being alive now calling to struggle that is an invitation to new life?

Pause amidst the overwhelm. When you’re in a challenging experience, ask what it is making available to you rather than how it is limiting you.

The invitation here, at a very elemental level, is to take in the magnitude — the peril and the promise — of being alive at this moment in time.

The invitation is to make a shift when we can — when we can get out from under a sense of overwhelm — to ask what the incredible fullness and gravity of now is making more available to us, rather than how it is limiting and uncomfortable.

What is my best self? Where do I keep it when I’m not being it?

Journal every day, even three words or three lines. Practice taking a single word as an oar to get you through the day.

This Wisdom Practice holds so much teaching about the human condition, and through that why journaling is such a fruitful spiritual practice, a life practice. Journaling is a way of being in conversation with yourself, but Naomi Shihab Nye takes that a step further: writing things down is a way of getting into community with yourself, with all of your different selves.

The invitation here is to start writing things down. Exchange words with yourself about what you’re doing here. You might land on a single word or phrase that you find animating and use it as Naomi teaches: as an oar that could get you through the days just by holding it differently, thinking about it differently, and seeing how it rubs against other words, how it interplays with other words.

She insists that we all, naturally, think in poems. And writing as a gift we make to ourselves, towards “the mysterious rising of one’s best self” — an act towards healing and wholeness and a sustainable, renewable, reality-based hope.

Notice all the death metaphors that come so naturally, so blithely. Start to shift them, and feel what that starts to shift in you.

What happens if we alter our language? Where would our future be? Where will we grow towards? We are so fluent in the sensibility and imagination and atmosphere of violence with our words. Part of the work of making hope more reasonable and more possible is putting more vivid, intentional language out there to illustrate its reality and its possibilities. Words orient us and orient the atmosphere of our cultures, both microcultures and the larger culture.

The invitation here is to really pay attention to the words you use, the words you engage, and the worlds these words are actively bringing into being and sustaining — to imagine the possibility of building a vocabulary of muscular hope. Building a vocabulary of the strength and the possibility of life, a vocabulary that makes the conditions more likely for what is lifegiving and redemptive.

Words make worlds, the ancient rabbis said. “We often tell our students, ‘The future’s in your hands,’ Ocean Vuong says. “But I think the future is actually in your mouth. You have to articulate the world you want to live in, first. We pride ourselves as a country that’s very technologically advanced. We have strong, good sciences, good schools, very advanced weaponry, for sure — but I think we’re still very primitive in the way we use language and speak.”

How will you move even through the most ordinary exchanges, if you take in Ocean’s wisdom that the future is in your mouth?

Do I have a delight radar?

Set out to actively cultivate joy in the most granular of experiences. What is pleasant and sweet and tender? What brings flashes of light into your day?

There’s a question loose in our hurting world: is it possible, is it a privilege, to be joyful in a time like this? But joy is a resilience-making, lifegiving birthright of being human. To suggest that you can’t be joyful in a time like this is akin to the idea that you can’t be hopeful unless everything has gone right for you.

In his Book of Delights, Ross Gay took it upon himself to move through a year looking for delight and writing about delight every day. “One of the things that surprised me,” he says, “was how quickly the study of delight made delight more evident.”

It’s precisely the closeness and ordinariness of what Ross attends to that makes him a teacher to us.