HOPE: THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE WRITER

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Hope is passion for what is possible. – Soren Kierkegaard

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As you embark on the new academic year, I want you to consider that all of your writing should carry a message of hope. You might think your own writing is insignificant, but once you submit it, it is now in the universe.

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Hope is a waking dream. – Aristotle

There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. – Leonard Cohen

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We know that sometimes a small gesture, seemingly insignificant, can make a difference. If you touch even one person, then it matters. Your work may just have a “ripple effect”—even leading to a tsunami of positive change. You never know.

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Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around, he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he? – It’s A Wonderful Life, Director, Frank Capra

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I truly believe in the small. After 9/11, I was completely overwhelmed. I felt helpless until I found a mantra I could live by: “Be one good person in the world.”

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Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness. – Desmond Tutu

Hopes sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible. – Helen Keller

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I find hope in every book I read—including the few books I read over the summer:

A New Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern. Ardern was New Zealand’s Prime Minister during Covid and the terrorist attack at Christchurch. She writes: “Never give up.... Why should my daughter, or anyone, feel hopeful in a world where there is ... so much hate, vilification, and extremism?... Could I, after all that I have seen, give one solid reason why we shouldn’t all just give up?... But ... I smile at her [her daughter]. “You’re right, Neve. We should never give up.”

Patriot by Alexei Navalny. Navalny was a Russian dissident who recovered from being poisoned, but then after 3 years in prison, collapsed and died. Just 2 months earlier, he wrote, “Our miserable, exhausted homeland needs to be saved.... It will crumble and collapse.... One day, we will look at it [the Putinist state], and it won’t be there. Victory is inevitable. But for now, we must not give up, and we must stand by our beliefs.”

While killing time in the Jasper, Canada, train station this summer, I realized the book I had been reading had fallen out of my backpack. I picked up a book there meant for a teenage audience about a despondent, lost, and pregnant girl who nearly crashed her boyfriend’s stolen truck into a diner in a small Canadian town. She eventually ended up finding redemption for herself and for many of the people who had taken her in.

So, don’t think for a minute that what you write doesn’t matter. You may never know. But you will know that you tried to bring solace, beauty, and/or understanding into the world.

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But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.  – George Eliot

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope. – Martin Luther King, Jr.