I found a penny in my driveway as I walked the dog today. It was scratched, clearly run over by someone at some point, and hardly shiny anymore. But I saw the glint as I walked toward my front door and leaned down to pick it up. Lucky penny, make a wish. These rules from when we were kids stay buried in our minds, and now I can’t see a penny on the ground by surprise without picking it up. Superstition. Or maybe a game I play with myself, a constant searching for some kind of glint or shine, some way to see the good. Like a little shiny thing affirms the view I want to believe in, the one where there is some magic destination ahead where things get easy and a little sign can promise me that.
I don’t even believe it like I did when we were kids, but I can’t stop the urge to at least try to hope, lucky pennies and all. I have clung to hope when it floated me on to the next destination and kept me from sinking, but I have also stupidly clung to hope when I shouldn’t have, when the train had already left the station and the real name for my hope was denial. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as everyone I know seems to be in a state where it’s hard to hope. My friends and I trade hurried texts every few days to check in, and it seems like there’s a lot of heaviness there for all of us. Maybe the general state of the world is seeping in on us like an open window in a storm. My close neighbor-friend dropped off a box of scones and a really fun card a few days ago to thank me for friendship in a tough year. (Though really she is the gift. I mean who pauses after radiation treatments to bake scones for a friend?) As I told her, I miss 2018-2020ish when we were like wow these are weird times that will eventually end. Now it just feels like wow, this is totally screwed up but I guess it’s just how it’s going to be forever.
Every piece of stereotypical advice that has been given to me in hard moments seems to center on hope. Hope for things yet unseen. Hold out for the miracle. One day everything will feel lighter and easier. But years ago, when I read Things Fall Apart for the first time, Pema Chodron’s view on hope turned all of that inside out, and it’s followed me all this time resting in the back of my brain somewhere and floating to the top again every now and then. For some reason, it’s been on my mind these last few days, so I looked back at it to read it again. She says, “Abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put ‘Abandon hope’ on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like ‘Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.’ Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment.” I guess she has to be right because that book hasn't failed me yet, but I have a hard time with this one. I live for hope. Like some shiny penny waiting for me on the sidewalk, like some promise life will get a little easier eventually.
In the efforts of abandoning hope, a question I ask myself when I’m brave enough to do it: What if it’s always this way? I don’t like to think about my answer to that question. Is there some magic tightrope I can walk between reaching for more and total surrender?
The older I get, the more I understand that yes, it will always be this way. Wherever I go, there I am, and the reach for more can be an endless insatiable quest. But even if I can live without hope, I can’t live without longing. Those might seem like the same thing, but they aren’t. Hope feels specific to me, some particular aim or outcome I want to see come to fruition. Longing is bigger and more amorphous. It’s that ache I can’t shut off that hasn’t once failed me. Hope has deceived me many times, but longing never has. It’s always my faithful guide. It’s the bigger yes that makes me say no to other things. Ironically, I sometimes have to lose the hope completely and surrender the specific outcome of a situation to see the longing that hides underneath it. So this is how it is now and something isn’t turning out the way I thought it would? So what? What’s the ache underneath, and what does it tell me to reach for?
I kept the penny. Old habits die hard, and I can’t stop hunting for glimmers and promises, even if I doubt them. Maybe what I want in 2024 is a way to shut off the expectations of hope and lean into the ache of longing instead. To know that a lot of things are true at once: It will always be this way. But it will not always be exactly like this. Acceptance is where you begin. But it’s okay to want more.
In that same chapter on hope, Chodron says, “This is where renunciation enters the picture— renunciation of the hope that our experience could be different, renunciation of the hope that we could be better. The real thing that we renounce is the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are.”
I think who I am, though I fight it sometimes and wish I could be saved from it, is that person who picks up a lucky penny even when it’s all dented and scratched up and I think that superstition is bullshit. Who holds a shred of hope even when I’m trying to abandon it. Who always harbors some shapeless ache that works like a compass for me and directs my steps like a voice I can’t help but listen to.
It reminds me of Tina Schuman’s poem “A World of Want,” so I’ll leave you with that as she says it better than I can. I’m off work for the year and hoping to spend these last two weeks of 2023 “quieting the conga-line of cravings” to discern what the bigger yearning is that waits underneath it and to let that longing shape my steps for 2024.
“A World of Want”
by Tina Schuman
You think your life will go on
like this forever—weekly trips
to the garbage bin, untangling
the green snake of hose between the ferns
and the delphiniums, the coral bells
leaning their long necks
against the back fence.
Today, as I watched the carousel
of cars turn one by one through
the intersection and onto the freeway
I tried to imagine each life.
Not so much where they were
going, but what they were made of:
wounds, illusions, desires, deceits…
Through all of this a preoccupation
with the next perceived need floats-up
like thought bubbles inside my head:
Coffee, Cheetos, sex, a new blouse, a larger house,
a desk fan, appreciation from that one specific person,
the phone’s chirp, the trip to France.
If I could quiet this conga-line of cravings
what lingering longings would I lament?
What radiant unattached insights
would I muster? Who would I be
without my constant yearnings?
It’s a world of want. You get the idea.