At some point across the last few years in my interviews on On Being, I began to ask people sometimes as a closing question, what is making you despair and what is giving you hope?

And something that was really fascinating that emerged is that I noticed that the answers to those

two questions were conjoint, that what people were hopeful about and despairing about

were not separate, not opposites, but in a kind of

interplay and relationship, that hope lives really close to our despair, and despair lives

close to our hope right on the other side of it, which is fascinating, and it makes me think about

the vitality and reality base to the kind of muscular hope that we're going to be exploring with this experiment.

And I know that vitality and reality base is not necessarily hope's reputation.

But I think I want to invite you to take a moment now or later today to answer

that question for yourself. Right now, today, what is making you despair? What is filling you with

despair? And what is giving you hope? And don't analyze what you've written. Just let it be a

beginning.

I want to name also right here at the beginning that there is so much in our world right now that evokes a profound, reasonable hopelessness.

Such a magnitude of suffering that the wisest of words and spiritual solace can't address.

And yet, looking back, I see hope as a defining, recurrent, ever-present feature of every wise and graceful person, every wise and graceful life I've come into conversation with. And that includes people who have shifted the world on its

axis in small ways, in vast ways.

So to approach this contradiction, this puzzle, I think definitions are called for.

Like other words we need most, like the word love, the word hope is a little bit ruined from overuse and from flimsy, superficial use. So let's talk first about what it's not. When I talk about hope, about muscular hope, I am not talking about anything to do with wishful thinking. It's not really idealism.

I don't use the word optimism.

I understand that some people use the word optimism, the way I use the word hope.

But to me, optimism has a bit of a feel of a faith that things in the end will turn out all right.

And that's not what I'm talking about.

...