Hope - the candlelight kind

The work of my life, in the office and outside it, is to create spaces where different kinds of hope can coexist, writes Amanda Brummell Lennestaal.

With today marking International Day of Hope, TSA General Manager Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Amanda Brummell Lennestaal writes about the quiet work of hoping.

I want to tell you something honest about hope. Not the version that arrives wrapped in a bow, trailing certainty behind it. Not the kind that says 'it will be okay'. That kind of hope, however well meant, has never once helped me. Mostly it has made me feel more alone in whatever I was carrying.  

The hope I know is smaller than that. Quieter. Sometimes it is barely a breath.  

I think of a candle. Sometimes it burns robustly against real darkness, unflinching. Sometimes it sits atop a birthday cake, joyful, a little triumphant. Sometimes it marks a grave, steady and solemn, the only warmth in an unbearable room. And sometimes it is on the absolute verge of being snuffed out, trembling with each movement of air, so fragile you find yourself holding your own breath so as not to be the thing that extinguishes it.

All of those are the same candle. All of those are hope.  

Hope in hard places

Part of my work is sitting with people in hard places. People carrying things that are heavy and complex and sometimes invisible to everyone around them.

In that space, I have learned that hope is not something you perform. It is something you practise, quietly, imperfectly, often without knowing if it is working.  That kind of hope is not optimism. It is not confidence. It is a decision made in the body before the mind catches up. It is showing up again. From the outside it can look like stubbornness. From the inside, it often just looks like Tuesday.  

I am also a mother. Three daughters, each extraordinary, each navigating a world that asks more of them than it should. There are days when I watch them and something in me floods with a feeling I can only call hope; involuntary and overwhelming. There are other days when I walk with one of them through something painful and I cannot find hope at all. On those days, I have learned to look for it somewhere outside myself.  

Hope looks unique for everyone

That is perhaps the truest thing I know about hope: you are not always the one who has to carry it.  There have been seasons when I could not locate hope anywhere in my own body. On those days I went outside. I walked. I let the sky be very large and my problems very small for just long enough to take the next breath. I wrote things down, not to resolve them but to make them visible, because named things are somehow more survivable than the shapeless dark. I sat with my daughters and let their presence be enough. Sometimes that was all hope was: not a belief that things would improve, but a reason to stay in the room.  

Hope looks different depending on who you are and what you have survived.

It is shaped by culture, by faith, by the kind of losses you carry. My hope is not your hope. What sustains me may mean nothing to you. What you reach for when darkness comes may be entirely foreign to my experience.  

I do not think that’s a problem; I think it’s the whole point.  The work of my life, in the office and outside it, is to create spaces where different kinds of hope can coexist. Where yours doesn’t have to look like mine to count. Where the tentative flame is as honoured as the robust one. Where we are allowed to say 'I can’t find it right now' and have someone else say 'that’s alright, I’ll hold it for you'.  

Someone has done that for me. More than once.  It is the most profound act I know.