Hope is a muscle.

~ Live & Learn

GQ: On Being sometimes seems like an outlier in today’s culture, in terms of its themes: patience, civility, mystery, asking questions rather than supplying answers. Why do you think it has resonated so deeply?

And simple ones.

Or something we can implement now.

Do you have hope that we’re going to get them back on the right track?

I think that hope is a muscle. The hope that I see to be transformative and modeled in very wise people who have shifted something in their world—civil rights leaders to [social justice activist] Bryan Stevenson to [labor activist] Ai-jen Poo—it’s not [idealistic]. I don’t use the word idealism. I don’t use the word optimism. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s not assuming that things will turn out all right. It’s an insistence, looking at the world straight on as it is and rejecting the idea that it has to be that way, and then throwing your light and your pragmatism as much as your spirit at [that]. What does it look like if you don’t accept it? That’s how I think of it…

One of the criticisms that gets lobbed at these conversations is that they’re too—and I know you just said you don’t like this word—idealistic, and perhaps not as important as conversations about politics or policy. You worked in Berlin in the 1980s and you saw geopolitics up close and personal, what it can do and the effect it can have on people’s lives. And yet you still came away to have these conversations. So you seem uniquely suited to respond to someone who’s skeptical, who says, why do these conversations matter?

We have a bias—which I also inherited, it’s in our education—to take what is dysfunctional and catastrophic and frightening and failing more seriously than what works well and what is quietly flourishing. The bias is a really powerful one. We’re learning about our bodies and brains—which is an incredible frontier. They’re so mobilized by threat or fear. There’s a level at which we’re so sophisticated, and then there’s this animal creature. We don’t investigate: what is generative? This is one of the motivations for me in starting the show. The question for me in the beginning is, how can we make goodness as riveting as evil and destruction? …

In science fiction, or even at the far edges of quantum physics, you hold this idea that there are parallel universes; that there are equal realities that may be wildly divergent. Because I have trained my eyes on this, I’m looking for it, I see it. There’s a phrase that came out of a study about the incredible health benefits from an intentional practice of gratitude: Take in the good. It’s not even about getting more optimistic. It’s just saying, I’m going to attend to that. I’m going to give that my attention. Maybe that’s the spiritual practice. That has become a discipline [for me]. What we practice becomes instinctive.

— Krista Tippett, excerpts from “Hope is a Muscle”: Why Krista Tippett Wants You to Keep the Faith” in an interview with Clay Skipper. (GQ, July 21, 2022)

43 thoughts on “Hope is a muscle.”

  2. Yes! –

    “There’s a phrase that came out of a study about the incredible health benefits from an intentional practice of gratitude: Take in the good. It’s not even about getting more optimistic. It’s just saying, I’m going to attend to that. I’m going to give that my attention. Maybe that’s the spiritual practice. That has become a discipline [for me]. What we practice becomes instinctive.

    Krista Tippett

    I consciously try to focus my gaze here on causes for gratitude. I often need reading glasses, but will keep trying! 🤓

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      1. You are riding that horse Dave – with every photo you share, with every quote that makes you marvel, with the generosity of seeking something/anything that can soothe the overheated, muggy, thick fog of day-to-day…You ride, pal

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          1. Aw pal, don’t be irritated when I reference the obvious…you don’t have to acknowledge the stuff that you’re good at – but your noble followers will.

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  3. “What we can do is create spaces where what defies us doesn’t define what can be possible.”

    “I feel like now, with the pandemic and these last few years, we’re in another before-and-after.” We are!

    I failed at finding this interview yesterday. Thank you very much for sharing.

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      1. It’s not even 6 am where I am yet. Less than 5 sips down my coffee. Ssshhhh

        I missed you and everyone here terribly.
        But I did not miss one post.
        Go ahead, test me!

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  4. Have been an ‘On Being’ acolyte for years…I want to be Krista when I grow up. 😉

    I love this whole passage, but the sentence that nailed me to the wall was this… “how can we make goodness as riveting as evil and destruction? …” It seems a particularly potent question in this moment.

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  6. I feel the same as Lori. I was drawn in by this sentence: how can we make goodness as riveting as evil and destruction? … Everyone runs and gawks at a disaster, but no one gawks at all the people who are doing things right. We need to concentrate more on those who are doing things right and follow that role model, and not pay as much attention to the jerks who do things wrong for attention. Maybe I’ve misunderstood the intention but that’s what I got out of that sentence.

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      1. Yes, exactly! We need more feel-good stories, and when someone does some monstrous act for attention, I think they should black out his face on the media and not give his name so he gets NO notoriety for his wicked deed.

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    1. Great article Daniel. Thank you for sharing. Loved the finish: “In Lear’s book about radical hope, the philosopher asks: How should we live with the potential collapse of our way of life, not knowing what awaits? Hoping on a daily basis is difficult, especially in times of depravity. Maybe the trick is to hold on to something that astonishes, that urges us into some unfathomable beyond, that sustains our faith in the possibility of sanctuary, relief, change for the better. I think of the way Joseph Brodsky—he, too, grew up in this city, walked the same intersection, perhaps even climbed the atrium rooftop before the Soviet government forced him into exile—described the kind of poetry he admired: that it “answers not the question ‘how to live’ but ‘for the sake of what’ to live.”

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