Wonder.

What I wanted to hear from my teachers on my first day of school.

What would I have wanted to hear from my teachers on my first day of school, or what would I want them to tell me if I became a student again?

Tales about my vacations? No. Those of my classmates? No. I would already know everything. You have to study? This is going to be difficult? We’re going to have to make more of an effort? No, no thank you. I know. This is why I’m here, and besides I’m deaf from the ear of duties. Tell me something different, something new, so that I don’t start getting bored already, but rather that I might feel even just a slight desire to start this school year. From the ear of passion, I can hear perfectly.

Show me that it’s worth my while to stay here for a whole year listening to you. Tell me please that all this will be relevant to my everyday life, that it will help me better understand the world and myself, that it’s worthwhile for me to be here. Show me, most of all through your own lives, that the effort you demand of me will fill my own life the way it fills yours. You have dedicated studies, efforts and dreams to teach me your subject, now show be that it’s all true, that you are conveyors of something desirable and indispensable, something that you own and that you wish to impart upon me as a gift. Show me that you lose sleep to teach me these things that — you say — are worth my efforts. I want to look into your eyes and if they’re not shining I’m going to get bored, I’m telling you now, and I’m going to do something else. You can’t lie to me. If you don’t believe it, then why should I? And don’t tell me about your salaries, about the union, about [Italian education minister] Gelmini, about your family and relationship troubles, about your failures and your obsessions. No. Tell me about how much you love the force of the sun that has burned for 5 billion years and transforms hydrogen into light, life and energy. Tell me how this happens, this miracle that will continue for at least another 5 billion years. Tell me why the moon always shows me her same face and teach me how to interrogate her like Leopardi’s shepherd did. Tell me how it’s possible that a rose has petals arranged according to a divine and infallible proportion and why the heart is a muscle that beats involuntarily and how the eye transforms light into images.

There are so many things in this world that I don’t know and that you could teach me, with eyes shining, because only wonder knows.

And tell me about the mystery of humans, tell me how the Greeks built their temples that you feel like you’re in contact with the gods, and how the Romans managed to combine beauty and utility like nobody else. Tell me how Leonardo da Vinci did it, how Magellan did it. Tell me the secret of Einstein, Gaudi’, or Mozart. If you know it, tell me.

Tell me, how am I supposed to decide what to do with my life, if I don’t know about the lives of others? Tell me, how am I supposed to find my own story, if I have not a bit of passion for those that left their mark? Tell me what I should gamble my life for. Or no, don’t tell me. I will decide for myself. You show me the possibilities. Help me discover my passions, my talents, and my dreams. And remember that you will only succeed if you yourself have dreams, projects and passions of your own. Otherwise how am I supposed to believe you? And remind me that my life is not repeatable, that it’s made for greatness, and help me not to settle for small pleasures, real and virtual, that may satisfy me in the moment, but that deep down just bore me…

Challenge me, put my best qualities to the test, and write them on your register along with all those grades that are always the same. Help me not to believe illusions, not to live on dreams filled with air, but at the same time teach me to dream and to have the patience to realize these dreams, turning them into projects.

Teach me to reason, such that I may not derive my beliefs from common cliches, from the dominant thought, from unreasoned thought. Help me to be free. Remind me of the unity of knowlegde and don’t tell me about the unity of Italy, but be united among each other: don’t talk ill of one another, I beg you. And remind me of how beautiful this country is, talk about it, make me want to discover everything it is hiding before I begin to long for a tropical vacation.

And please, one last favor, keep your cynicism to yourselves. Don’t hide your battles from me, but give me the strength to bear them and don’t poison my hopes even before I have conceived them.

For this, one day, I will remember you.

Thank you, Prof. 2.0.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Long.

People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.

Flannery O'Connor, from "The Nature and Aim of Fiction"

Excellent.

Excellent albums ...

Illumination.

A couple of years ago, a group of eager reading, writing, and thinking students at the school where I teach came to me with the request that they might use my classroom as a clubhouse once a week after school.  They were having a difficult time meeting after hours and thought that a regular meeting during the day could be the ticket.  

Thus was born The Eunoia Society, a self-created, self-managed, and self-named group of "crooked trees" that are some of the most energetic and inspiring people I've ever met.

Eunoia is currently in the process of creating a collaborative literary and illustrative "concept album" of short stories, like The Wall or Sgt. Pepper's they tell me.  I get updates and samples for critique at all hours of the day and night, all week long.

Last night came this hopeful message from a member ... 

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never Is, but always To be blest.

The soul, uneasy, and confin'd from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Alexander Pope

Hope.

"Hope to the last!” said Newman, clapping him on the back. “Always hope; that’s a dear boy. Never leave off hoping; it don’t answer. Do you mind me, Nick? it don’t answer. Don’t leave a stone unturned. It’s always something, to know you’ve done the most you could. But, don’t leave off hoping, or it’s of no use doing anything. Hope, hope, to the last!"

Charles Dickens, from Nicholas Nickleby

Oft.

Doisneau, Enfant Papillion, 1945

“Many are the strange chances of the world," said Mithrandir, "and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the wise falter."

J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Silmarillion

Thanks, Noah.

Kids rule.

Risk.

To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on your futures, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

Rebecca Solnit, from Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.

Rebecca Solnit, from Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

Thank you, Jess.

Wildest.

The BELLS of HEAVEN

‘Twould ring the bells of Heaven

The wildest peals for years,

If Parson lost his senses

And people came to theirs,

And he and they together

Knelt down with angry prayers

For tamed and shabby tigers,

And dancing dogs and bears,

And wretched, blind pit-ponies

And little hunted hares.

Ralph Hodgson

Grace.

Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, 1629

There is a twilight zone in our hearts that we ourselves cannot see. Even when we know quite a lot about ourselves -- our gifts and weaknesses, our ambitions and aspirations, our motives and our drives -- large parts of ourselves remain in the shadow of consciousness. This is a very good thing. We will always remain partially hidden to ourselves. Other people, especially those who love us, can often see our twilight zones better than we ourselves can. The way we are seen and understood by others is different from the way we see and understand ourselves. We will never fully know the significance of our presence in the lives of our friends. That's a grace, a grace that calls us not only to humility, but to a deep trust in those who love us. It is the twilight zones of our hearts where true friendships are born.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Instant.

It is somewhat amusing, indeed, to notice the difference between the fate of these three paradoxes in the fashion of the modern mind. Charity is a fashionable virtue in our time; it is lit up by the gigantic firelight of Dickens. Hope is a fashionable virtue to-day; our attention has been arrested for it by the sudden and silver trumpet of Stevenson. But faith is unfashionable, and it is customary on every side to cast against it the fact that it is a paradox. Everybody mockingly repeats the famous childish definition that faith is “the power of believing that which we know to be untrue.” Yet it is not one atom more paradoxical than hope or charity. Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and, eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

G.K. Chesterton, from Heretics

Love.

The teenager who lives like it's the 1940s ...

"I'm rubbish with technology," Callum says. "I was forced to have a laptop for college, and I hated it."

Callum and his grandmother have lived together for seven years. Callum says he fell in love with the 40s during his first year of high school.

"I've always loved history," he says. "When I was younger, I looked at my great grandad's prisoner-of-war diaries and I just love everything about the period."

He now collects everything related to the period, such as oil lamps and a vintage record player that he uses to listen to his favourites like Vera Lynn, Anne Shelton and Frank Sinatra.

"I couldn't tell you a modern singer if you asked me," he says.

Praise God, there's hope. 

Choose.

Ari Weinzweig speaks of the times ...

In Finding Beauty in a Broken World, Terry Tempest Williams writes about award-winning Italian mosaicist Marco de Luca. Of his craft, de Luca declares, “Out of randomness, you create order.” Which is what, I can see now in hindsight, the Six-Pointed Hope Star that I wrote about in Secret #45 does in our work and our lives. The Hope Star is a construct created to help us find, and build, hope in a broken world that often leaves us struggling to find our emotional footing. In order, these are the six points:

1. Help people see a better future.

2. Help people see how they might get to that future.

3. Show people how much they matter.

4. Help people see how much their work matters.

5. Help people see how small steps are the keys to success.

6. Show people how they fit into a larger whole.

We can, I believe, do these six things for everyone we work with, every day, usually simply in the course of our daily work. At times like these, when I’m feeling very sad, I’ve learned, that I also need to do them for myself, since, no matter what happens, I won’t get far in my work and my life unless I begin by choosing hope. When I choose hope, it helps me to believe. It helps me find happiness in hard times. It helps me not to sink into the helplessness that I often feel coming on. It helps me hold course. And it’s not just about me; if we want to help those we work with to have healthy lives, then helping them learn to also consciously choose hope is equally important. 

Impact.

Ari Weinzweig on making hope a choice ...

Leaders who raise hope levels—and are themselves also hopeful—are far more effective. Same goes for parents, poets, politicians, and physicians. It is only with hope, I’ve come to see that we can create the kind of companies, communities and countries that we want to be a part of. Maybe, on a smaller scale, this is simply a reminder to myself and anyone else who’s interested how much difference hope can make. To keep in mind that every move we make and every sentence we speak (or don’t speak) is impacting our own hope and also the hope of those around us. And remember how much impact even a few words can have far from the headlines.

Perhaps.

Hope.

Think.

13:29.

13:29 ...

Refuge.

Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown God. Then if a bird sings among your branches, do not be too eager to tame it. If you are conscious of something new - thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being - do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness.  Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.

In these moments of tête-à-tête with the infinite, how different life looks! How all that usually occupies and excites us becomes suddenly puerile, frivolous, and vain. We seem to ourselves mere puppets, marionettes, strutting seriously through a fantastic show, and mistaking gewgaws for things of great price.  He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions – such a man is a mere article of the worlds furniture – a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being – an echo, not a voice.  Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel