Nick Cave has taken over my life.
Mr. Cave has been putting out music since the mid 1980s with his band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He’s also a writer, screenwriter, poet, and all-around interesting dude.
His band’s most famous song, “Red Right Hand,” serves as the theme song for the show Peaky Blinders, which I have been watching this summer.
In a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, Cave talked about a letter he received from a fan who struggled to find hope as a young father:
“Following the last few years, I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever….do you still believe in us [human beings]?”
Whether we’re struggling to stay motivated on a project or goal, or we get overwhelmed as a ”Receiver of Memories” for all the pain in the world, I know what it’s like to get cynical and lose hope sometimes!
I bet you do too.
Which is why I was so damn moved by Nick’s reply, which I promise you is worth the watch:
Because I’m a nice guy I took the liberty of writing out Cave’s reply here:
“My early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent.
The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line.
It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people…
…It took a devastation to find hope.”
Here I paused the video, and learned that Cave’s 15-year old son had accidentally fallen to his death back in 2015.
Armed with this knowledge, I continued watching the video and was moved to tears:
“Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth.
Hopefulness is not a neutral position.
It’s adversarial.
It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.”
Hope Plus Acceptance
I’ve written about acceptance quite a bit in this newsletter, as it’s the skill I’ve had to work hardest at developing for myself over the past few years.
I’m now realizing that acceptance combined with hope is the most powerful path forward when we are trying to navigate life.
It’s not just having passive hope that “things will work out.” After all, things might not work out. At least, not the way we expect them to.
Rather, it’s actively accepting the “Yes, and” rule and cultivating hopefulness that we can endure whatever comes our way.
As Cave Said in a recent Red Hand File:
I wrote in Faith, Hope and Carnage, ‘Hope is optimism with a broken heart’.
This means that hope has an earned understanding of the sorrowful or corrupted nature of things, yet it rises to attend to the world even still.
In a past essay I wrote about hope, I pulled this quote from Dr. Lakshmin’s Real Self-Care:
“Hope needs to be “something you do,” not “something you feel.”
The 4 Tenets of Hope
Life is hard.
We do our best to build a workout routine, or change our diet, or work up the courage to make a change, and then life kicks our ass. Our kid gets sick or we get downsized or the world shuts down. And we get derailed.
The more frequently this happens, the more likely we are to become demoralized.
And because we’re humans with feelings, we probably feel an overwhelming desire to run away from this discomfort by coping as best we know how (food, drinking, avoidance, etc.), even if that takes us further away from our goals.
We know this only makes things worse, so what can we do instead?
This is where “Hope Modules” come in.
Designed at George Washington University for patients with cancer or chronic illnesses, Hope Modules can provide a framework for us to treat hope as a strategy.
Dealing with setbacks is hard, but we can develop resilience. We’re not hoping that things turn out for the best, but rather we are “practicing hope” that we can make changes and have some personal agency over how we can move forward.
If you’re at a point on your journey where you’re demoralized, and tired of the negative feedback loop, here are 4 alternative coping mechanisms that can have a virtuous positive influence on us after a failure:
- Problem solving and goal seeking: sit down right now and write out “what’s the next step I can take to improve my lot in life.” This might be applying for the next job, or going to the gym and doing the next workout, or throwing away things that no longer serve you. Can you take the next step? These steps can remind us “I have agency! I’m not completely without a choice.”
- Emotional regulation: This is actively focusing on the reduction of stress, or identifying the things that are wearing us down. Practices like yoga, meditation, journaling, going for a walk, therapy, etc., all work, too.
- Activating a core identity: Take time to ask yourself the important questions: What are my important values? Who is the person I aspire to be? Can I reinforce my position in my family, group, church, club, the NF Rebellion, and even the greater human race? Can I reinforce the shared experience that being a human IS hard, and I’m not alone on this journey?
- Relational coping: Reaching out to a family member or a friend. Reconnecting with somebody that you want to spend more time with. Asking a trusted confidant for advice or even helping mentor somebody else who also is in need.
Build your Hope Toolkit
Think of these things like the gift Galadriel gives Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring:
“‘In this phial,’ she said, ‘is caught the light of Eärendil’s star…It will shine still brighter when night is about you.
May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”
Take some time right now, and think about the following:
“When things go wrong, when I mess up, when things fall apart, or when I don’t follow through…These specific strategies can help me short circuit unproductive coping mechanisms and help me get back on track sooner.”
This is what we’re really trying to do. Not learning to fail less, but rather how to get back on track more quickly.
So let’s get started:
We need acceptance of our current situation, a reminder of our goals and values, a check-in with people who love us, and then taking deliberate steps towards the life or goal we want.
We can identify what worked or didn’t work on our last attempt. We can make sure we’re on the right path.
And then we can try again.
We can “pivot and persist:”
We can work to envision the future we want, we can identify the different paths to get there, and then we can take the first step to start again. At the same time, we can develop healthier self-talk (self-compassion instead of self-criticism) to build agency and belief that we will continue to try again, and try differently.
This is how we create self-efficacy: earned hope that we can make change that sticks.
Hope can be practiced by locating a deep desire, value, or commitment and taking a step towards it.
Hope is the warrior emotion that lays waste to the resistance in our heads.
Hopefulness helps us realize “Even if life is a dumpster fire, I have the ability to endure and survive whatever ball of chaos is heading my way.”
I leave you with this today:
Whatever goal you are working towards, whatever struggle you find yourself stuck on, no matter where you find yourself in the game of life…
I hope this newsletter reminds you that things may be not okay, but we can still take a hopeful act that is within our control.
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