To most of us it seems that nothing makes sense
anymore. Which is especially true if you expect things to make sense in
the first place. Silly you.
Jonathan Lear's Book
"Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural
Devastation" looks at the response of Chief Plenty Coups of the
Crow to the collapse of his people's traditional way of life and culture to
examine how a community should responds to the collapse of its culture - sound
familiar?
According to him "Radical Hope" as practiced by Chief Plenty Coups is
the ability to maintain hope in a meaningful existence even when one's
existence has lost all meaning. It is hope that goes beyond one's ability to
formulate an idea of what one hopes for.
If one cuts through all the hype, hyperbole and intellectualisation, what Lear
confirms is that:
The only sensible response to life is to insist on joy in spite of everything; and
The only way to do that, is by swimming easy in the deep!
We fixate on global warming, the economic meltdown and the rise of religious
fundamentalism while most of us know that there really isn't all that much we
can do about any of those things except know that they too will pass.
Which isn't to say we should pollute, spend or pray our way into
oblivion. Far from it.
What we should be doing is living the kinds of lives that resonate with the
universe while laughing at the bogeymen that rise up to threaten us and
refusing to be drawn into the bleakness and seriousness that envelops the
world.
Here's the thing: Joy is everywhere, even in despair. Most often joy finds its way around even the bleakest and most challenging situations and when that isn't possible, joy is all you have ... and that's always enough.
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