Hope
I wrote this a few days after the 2024 US presidential election in the middle of the night. My subconscious was thinking about my friend Mark Fish. He died in 2017. We talked about politics and art often. We shared a love of street art. Shepard Fairey recently had an exhibition in Stockholm with the original Obama Hope piece. Maybe that was on my mind too.
When Arthur and I host Thanksgiving dinner in Stockholm, I start the dinner with an expression of gratitude instead of a prayer because I’m no longer religious. I decided to read this stream of consciousness this year.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s sad that my friend did not get to see this bad day. We don’t get to share the anguish of our motherland writing its final chapter. I feel he should know his deathbed hope for a better future did not come true—at least yet.
He would want to join me in hoping together that things don’t turn out as bad as they could for another 4 years. He always hoped harder than me. He hoped when I couldn’t any more. And yet it is he who cannot hope any more because he is not here to hope on this bad day.
But I am. So I hope for those who hoped before me. It’s easier to honor their wishes than to process the probabilities of the present problems. They may be gone but their hope carries on. Their hope was never blind, but they now need me to see it for them.
I hope for cures to the causes that took my friend away. I hope for peace, not just for those resting eternally. It’s hard for me to hope for anything more because I cannot be intellectually dishonest with myself given the [waving hand gestures] present state of things.
So I choose to be grateful when I cannot be hopeful.
Grateful to get to see if things do indeed turn out alright.
Grateful to still have time to left that wrong right.
Grateful to have known hope.
Grateful for a friend whose influence ripples thru time and space to bring me clarity at 3 AM when I should be sleeping.
And maybe I’m hopeful I might one day be that friend for someone else’s anxious insomnia because I would be grateful for that too.
