Hope In Small Doses

HOPE

IN SMALL DOSES

NIKKI STERN

RUTHENIA PRESS

Princeton, NJ

Copyright © 2015 Nikki Stern

Ruthenia Press

445 Sayre Drive

Princeton, NJ 08540

(609) 951-0492

Distributed by Smashwords

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews; nor may any part of this book be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the author.

Editors: Marly Cornell, Luis Granados

Photography: Cherie Siebert [www.artsfish.com]

Cover Design: Deborah Stern

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

For Jim, who loved the life he had

Forward

Can anyone resolve the meaning of life, find the perfect connections between brain physiology and human emotion and adjudicate whether free will is reality or illusion in 150 or so pages? Of course not, but Nikki Stern sets us on the path in a book sparkling with observations, human dramas, and plenty of quandaries. Drawing on medical literature about pain and aging, art from Hesiod’s poetic take on Pandora’s Box to the film Men In Black’s comic take on the shape of the cosmos, and speculations of secularists and an occasional theist, Nikki explores the rather awesome persistence of hope.

This is not about the guarantee of reward in the afterlife or the pernicious falsehood of thinking we can all mold the world to our rational manipulation alone. It is a hard fought effort to believe what is best about the human spirit, a dogged determination to figure out how, in a world without certainty, each of us must hope (and work and play) as if our lives mattered. Because, as Nikki reminds us, they do!

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Esq.

Executive Director, Americans United for Separation of Church and State

CONTENTS

Dedication

Forward

Introduction

Chapter 1: To Hope or Not to Hope

Chapter 2: The Thing with Feathers

Chapter 3: Pandora’s Mistake

Chapter 4: Brain Food

Chapter 5: Happy Talk

Chapter 6: Stuff Happens

Chapter 7: Make it Stop Hurting

Chapter 8: End of the Line

Chapter 9: On Purpose

Chapter 10: Practically Happy

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Bibliography

Introduction

Hope in small doses. What does that even mean? Isn’t that the first thing a reader might ask upon hearing that title?

Would I need to add a subtitle? Provide an oral or written explanation? Include a disclaimer?

None of the above, as it turns out. Hope-seekers are smart people. Most of those I asked had an idea where I was going with the concept even before they saw the chapter titles, read the opening paragraphs, took in Cherie Siebert’s stunning photography (ooh, pictures) or realized how compact the book is (ooh, short).

Others weren’t sure what I meant, but they were nevertheless curious enough to pick up a copy.

Why an updated version? Not two decades into the 21st century, we are more than ever in need of a collective outlook informed neither by inflexible certainty nor soul-sucking cynicism; one that recognizes setbacks, plans for disappointment and still manages to hold its head up. Everyone will have his or her own idea about hope and its value, of course. But I suspect—I hope—whoever is reading this book is ready to try a new approach or improve upon a familiar one.

In any event, welcome.

CHAPTER 1

To Hope or Not to Hope

Hope, deceitful as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.

-Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld

Hope. The word fairly quivers with possibility. We might, it could, perhaps, what if, why not? Don’t stop; keep going; what have we got to lose? Imagine, hope urges us. We do. Hope builds nations, inspires explorers, rescues the depressed, lifts up the miserable, at least if centuries of writers, thinkers, poets, philosophers, and psychologists are to be believed.

Lovely as that sounds, it doesn’t answer the question: What precisely is hope? An emotion? A belief? An instinct? Learned behavior?

It’s all these and more—or less, depending on what you read and whom you believe. In English, the word is burdened with multiple meanings and restrictions, until very recently, on its use as an adverb. The Associated Press Stylebook, the journalist’s bible, has come around, declaring via Twitter that it now supports the contemporary usage of hopefully.¹ Since I’d been breaking that particular grammar rule for years, I greeted the announcement with relief.

The English language is guided by rules and confounded by exceptions to those rules. Words have multiple uses or overlapping meanings. Hope is just one example. Who cares? you may be asking. Yet trying to understand hope is critical to understanding how it might work in our lives, regardless of who we are, where we live, or where we are along our birth-to-death journey. Moreover, research continues to show that being able to experience hope is integral to living well.²

I learn, as many of us do, by asking questions. One that occurs to me is whether hope can work in the life of someone who questions so much.

If it’s possible to be born a skeptic, I was. I wanted something to believe in; I just couldn’t figure out what it should be. I had a vivid imagination that was sparked as much by dark possibilities as fairy tales. I saw not dead people but fiery crashes and watery graves, falling trees and swinging swords, wolves with red eyes and sharp teeth, imprisoned princesses and lost children. The Grimm versions of the classic tales made more sense to me than their Disney counterparts.

Though I distrusted conventional happy endings, I yearned for them. I wanted a life that was secure and exciting, adventurous, but also anchored by one true love and a place to call home. I dreamed of romance and marriage, and a career as a successful artist and philanthropist. I kept adjusting those dreams over the course of a lifetime. The career became less about renown than respect, the image of Prince Charming less about being perfect and more about being loyal and true. I did feel my life might work out favorably overall. Maybe I hoped it would.

Even as a child, I doubted a version of hope that looked like a greeting card, all flowers and rainbows and laughing children and woodland animals with big eyes. I knew that sort of hope was a fantasy: a miasma of unrealistic expectations and unsubstantiated beliefs, a magic place where everything works out for the best because the cosmos is inclined toward beneficence. Most adults don’t see the world that way; I just grew suspicious earlier. Yet we’re all prone (some might say vulnerable) to feelings of hope. Those feelings, as it turns out, take many forms.

Many of us equate hope with religion, or the belief in a supreme entity with a plan that we mere mortals can’t understand.

The devout have faith that this entity will see to our welfare and reward us accordingly in the afterlife. No matter how terrible or inexplicable our present circumstances might be, there is sense in what is happening. Believers surrender to the superior goodness or wisdom of the plan, or whoever made it. There may be doubts along the way; but that sort of hope ultimately comes from the certainty that whatever happens, it’s all for the best.

A second version of hope depends not so much on any identified deity, but rather on an unshakable conviction that we have absolute control over our own destinies. Life coaches and some therapists emphasize a form of hope that is the manifestation of our desires. In that paradigm, whatever we want will come to us if we simply learn to harness our internal energies and direct them in a particular fashion. The method evokes a sort of if you want it, it will come scenario.

What these versions of hope seem to have in common is their emphasis on predictability, on the certainty that belief in the power of either our own minds or a higher authority will yield a positive outcome. This is faith as expectation, mixed in, perhaps, with no small amount of entitlement. We will be rewarded for good behavior, i.e., for thinking correctly or believing fully.

For skeptics like me, absolute certainty is anathema; and any faith that turns on a rigid doctrine rather than on critical inquiry isn’t one I’m likely to embrace. I’m inclined to look—and look and look—before I leap, whether the topic is politics, entertainment, or the latest absolutely true piece of information my best friend or search engine puts in front of me. It’s not that I believe everything can be explained through deductive reasoning; I don’t. I accept the unknowable, just as I accept my place in the cosmos (minor, miraculous, and less than fully comprehendible) with an attendant amount of awe and reverence. This mindset imposes its own requirements. I feel duty-bound to try to overcome my petty concerns and selfish impulses (although I don’t always succeed) so that I might both appreciate human existence and perhaps add to it.

To embrace with conviction a better future in the face of adversity, the faithful might insist, is to display courage. I go along with that notion to a degree. Yet the kind of hope that depends exclusively on an external force easily morphs into passivity. The emphasis is on waiting. We wait for fate or fortune or some movement of the universe to make something happen: to change the world, fix the economy, heal (or take) a sick relative, hand out some sort of reward, or exact some sort of punishment. The upward-facing patience of the truly pious can be inspiring but hope as an exercise in wait-and-see doesn’t do much of anything for me or, I suspect, many others.

Then there’s activist hope. The opposite of the submissive version, it’s based on the conviction that we can make a difference. There are those, both religious and secular, who believe they have a moral duty to make the world a better place. The former see it as a directive from God, the latter as the only way to live in fellowship with other human beings. Activist hope fueled Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and informed his slogan Yes, we can. Notwithstanding the presumed religious source of Obama’s inspiration, many people saw his hope as a secular call to arms. We don’t wait passively for the universe or the higher power to act—or for our candidate to get elected, or our schools to get better. We do something.

Hope with teeth.

Activist hope doesn’t appear to need divine encouragement, which might make it work for questing skeptics or other manner of human-centric individual. At the 2014 Secular Conference, human rights activist Gita Sahgal suggested such hope might even conquer fear.³ Certainly the idea that dedicating oneself