Layers of Hope

A Glimmer of Hope at the Institute

By Laura Minnetian

A few weeks ago, my dear friend Lena asked me, “What gives you hope?” I blanked for a second, the question threw me off completely. I was puzzled, not knowing what to say or to think. What even is hope? A feeling, a notion, a concept? I don’t know. I told her that I would come back to her later but never did. Until now, when I set out to find hope at and around the Institute, hoping it might eventually lead me to my own answer. So Lena, please read this as my answer to your question.

When asking people for their thoughts on hope, it was not their answers I was most surprised about, but rather the immediate openness and depth within the conversations. No matter if I asked dear friends, acquaintances, or people I talked to for the first time. The answers always seemed heartfelt, revealing new bits of their personality I had not encountered before. When going into this, my goal was to identify the different dimensions of hope. I wanted to make it more tangible. Three leading questions concurrently came to mind: “What is hope?”, “What gives you hope?” and “How does it make you feel?”.

What is hope?

The answers varied widely.  A large portion were positive in seeing hope as an action, energy, or a spark, something always followed by a deed. While the negative description of hope was explained as the opposite of resignation.

“Hope is not a feeling, it is the act of repeatedly showing up. It is an action” (Lena).  This was underlined by “It is established through constant practice, which has structuring force. Meaning hope requires a lot of work and effort, it is the everyday decision you have to take.” It was also seen as something intrinsic: “one can also find it from within oneself […] it is a skill that can be learned” (Noa). Following these answers, hope seems to be a mixture of immediate action, a spark, as someone names it, and something in need of constant care and thought to be able to flourish. “It is like the garden metaphor, you plant one seed, which grows into a garden, generating multiple gardens around it” (Elisa).

As much as hope can be seen as the energy for action, as Alessandro reflected, it can also prevent people from acting. He explains that hope can set the bar so high that it creates an unreachable idealization, leading to inaction: people become too afraid to ground or materialize it in reality, knowing it would never match what they imagined.  Meaning when wanting to act upon hope “you have to be comfortable with the unknown, it requires the absence of certainty” (Bronwyn).

This made me think that hope is deeply tied to trust, for who would act on such energy without knowing the outcome? But is hope not also something more than trust? Could it even be called a love for life? Can there be hope without love, or love without hope?

La pointe de la jonction (le Rhône et l’Arve)

What gives you hope?

“Francesca Albanese,” Emilia said jokingly. But in fact, a recurring theme was being surrounded by like-minded, knowledgeable people, those working in the field of international relations, fighting for a better world, who actively care and express their solidarity. Next to that, hope is found in the younger generations. Kaia, for instance, expressed amazement at the eagerness of youth to stand up for their rights. Children too were seen as a source of hope, for their lightness of being.

It is other people’s actions that sustain other people’s hope. But it is not only what they do, but also simply their presence. One woman, who arrived in Switzerland knowing no one, described how being around people, spending time with them, slowly allowed her to build both a network and a sense of safety. Reflecting on all these answers, to me they revealed that people are seen as carriers of hope and how dependent we are on them. Because, as someone put it, “Without hope I would not be here”, which, listening to all of this, begins to sound like: without people, I would not be here. Making trusting people not an option, but rather a non-negotiable act.

But it’s not only people who give each other hope. For someone, hope is “Art, without which the world would be so empty” (Reza). Hope is in nature, seeing the cycle of nature repeating itself, never stopping, always continuing, no matter what happens, as exemplified in the garden metaphor. For a few, hope was also found in their hobbies, playing theatre or drinking tea together, in health, and in the “pensée positive”. Reading from all of these, hope can be found in actions making oneself happy, and give one a sense of community and belonging. 

What does hope feel like?

For some, hope can be felt in specific moments: “It is the feeling after the theater ended, it is an introspective gut feeling” (Alessandro) or “feeling you have during a protest, when everyone is fighting and chanting for the same cause” (Noa). It is also a sense of anger, a spark, bright and fiery, “it is the opposite of resignation, which is precisely the moment I start losing hope” (Emma). While for others it can be felt through everyday encounters with beloved people, the feeling of sun on your skin, or simply spending time in nature. Listening to these descriptions, I began to see hope as reverent energy, crawling up from deep inside of you, spreading out this mixture of love and movement for your fellows and desire for a better world, but also a tiny bit of sadness or anger, for even having to fight for all of this.

Clearly hope has many layers, but everyone I talked to agreed on hope being a force marked by necessity and strife. It can be expressed loudly by holding each other’s hands or screaming in anger or love for each other, but simultaneously hope can be found in quiet and solitary moments, through a single teardrop. Personally, I find hope in people. In people who notice, listen, ask, and overall care. It is the person who stops to pick up something you dropped, while everyone else is walking by. In a world where everyone is striving to be the best version of themselves, it is the people who show themselves to be vulnerable, who stop obsessing over being perfect, who let you trust them blindly, and most importantly, who accept themselves as they are, not perfect, but human. A feeling which almost makes my heart burst into a thousand pieces, but at the same time is the force holding it together.

Now, let me ask, what is hope for you?