Active Hope
In Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone’s work, hope stops being a prediction—*"it’ll all work out in the end"*—and becomes a practice. You don’t *have* it; you *do* it, like gardening or practicing tai chi. Three movements make it up: facing reality head-on, naming the direction you want to see unfold, taking a step toward it. It doesn’t require optimism—you can practice it even when you feel hopeless, because what guides it isn’t gauging the odds but intention. Hope becomes a verb.
Active Hope is a practice. Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have. It is a process we can apply to any situation, and it involves three key steps. First, we take a clear view of reality; second, we identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we’d like things to move in or the values we’d like to see expressed; and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction.
Active hope arises from sharing the word hope. There is hope-as-desire— knowing the world you long for, so deeply it hurts—and there is what you do with it. Passive hope waits for some external force to bring about what you wish; active hope turns the one who hopes into an agent of what they hope for. The shift lies entirely in this move from noun to verb: not a state of mind you endure, but a gesture you repeat.
This is why it doesn’t depend on optimism. Calculating your odds, then only moving forward when you feel confident, still bases action on a gamble. Macy and Johnstone reverse the order: you first choose what you want to bring about, and intention becomes the guide—even in places where, if you measured things coldly, you’d find yourself without hope. The practice is rooted in the Work That Reconnects, where facing the clarity of ongoing collapse doesn’t extinguish the capacity to act but sets it free. That’s why active hope can be thought alongside those who learn to stay with the trouble rather than flee it.
Active hope is not optimism: the optimist bets things will turn out well, and their energy collapses when the forecast darkens. Nor is it pessimism, which bets the opposite and just as thoroughly demobilizes—both wager on an outcome. And it’s not passive hope, which waits for others to act: here, you don’t wait for the thing to happen; you become one of the paths by which it can.