No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain

by Rebecca Solnit

How we see the world has everything to do with what we can do in the world. Action is shaped by vision—the frameworks through which we understand the world—or so it has long seemed to me.

I’ve become a lover of slowness, patience, endurance, and long-term vision, because these things seem like crucial equipment for changing the world or even understanding it. And I’ve become a storyteller who seeks out examples of these tools at work, as I’ve come to recognize that changing the story, dismantling the stories that trap us, finding stories adequate to our realities, are foundational to finding our powers and possibilities.

In valuing the small events—coincidences, meetings, epiphanies—that often lead to large impacts. The terms shortsighted and inevitable are familiar; I would love to have longsighted as a term for the capacity to see patterns unfold over time, and maybe evitable as the opposite of inevitable.

Hope in this sense is just the recognition that in that uncertainty there may be the space in which to move toward the best and away from the worst of those possibilities, that the future is not (as it is so often spoken of) a place that already exists, toward which we are trudging, but a place that we are creating with what we do and how we do it (or don’t) in

the present. Or, rather, hope is that recognition and a commitment to the pursuit of the better possibilities within the spaciousness of the unknown, the not yet created.

But discomfort with uncertainty manifests as fatalism, pessimism, doomerism, despair—or sometimes as optimism—when it pretends that we know for certain what will happen. It reduces the vastness of the unknown into the known, the false certainty that pretends to know as a means of ignoring the fact that we don’t. The likely happens often, but the unlikely happens often enough that it cannot be disregarded. The things that seem obvious, predictable, inevitable in hindsight were often regarded beforehand as impossible or unlikely, and an accurate memory of that equips us to aspire again to what we’re told cannot happen. The misremembering of the past (or not remembering the past at all) ill equips us to face the future.

Perhaps the devastation of such a pandemic was too hard to believe, seemed too improbably unlike recent history, which is why governments that were warned of the possibility and then the inception did so little to prepare for it. When it comes to real life, this state of unknowing is both normal and so wildly uncomfortable that we engage in foolish and delusional imitations of knowing, whether it’s trusting untrustworthy authorities or making pronouncements about outcomes with no particular basis in fact, knowledge, or history.

Despair’s cheerleaders offer the same message that institutions all around us do: that we are powerless, that power resides in the few, at the center, at the top. Part of resistance must consist of refusing to believe them, and that can be reinforced by better versions of history and theories of change. These can include the terror of the elites when ordinary people exercise their power.

What motivates us to act is a sense of possibility within uncerthan female, straight thantainty—a sense that the outcome is not yet fully determined and our actions may matter in shaping it. This is all that hope is, and we are all teeming with it all the time in small ways. We plant a seed expecting both that it might grow and that we might be around to see it grow and admire the flower or eat the fruit. We buy five pounds of flour in the expectation we’ll probably live long enough to do that much baking, buy a ticket for a trip weeks or months away. We may be run over by a bus on our way out for coffee in the morning, but we hope we’ll be around to drink the whole cup and then get on with our day. I’ve often tasted depression as hopelessness that the bleakness of the present will ever change, as those states of mind when nothing tastes good and nothing seems worthwhile and the obstacles to anything better seem insurmountable. Disciplines and routines have been one of my ways of keeping the gloom at bay, but I’ve also learned that the feeling that nothing will change is just mental weather, and that the record is all in favor of change (if not necessarily for the better). That’s helped, too, and it’s why I try to distinguish between despair as a feeling and as a forecast.

The conversations are about violence and inequality, about the intersectionalities of race and gender, about the rethinking of gender beyond the simplest binaries, about what freedom could look like, what desire could be, what equality would mean. Just to have those conversations is liberatory. To see younger women reach beyond what my generation perceived and claimed is exhilarating. These conversations change us in ways the law cannot, make us understand ourselves and each other in new ways, reconceive race, gender, sexuality, and possibility.

When it comes to who’s harming the climate, it’s also been popular to focus on individual contributions. The fossil fuel industry likes the narrative of personal responsibility as a way to keep us scrutinizing ourselves and one another, rather than them. They’ve promoted the concept of climate footprints as a way to keep the focus on us and not them, and it’s worked. Usually, if I ask people what they’re doing about the climate emergency, most will talk about what they’re not consuming or doing—but these will never add up to the speed and scale of change needed to change the system.

Change often functions more like a relay race, with new protagonists picking up where the last left off.

Recognizing the reality of climate breakdown means recognizing the interconnectedness of all things. That connection brings obligation: to respect nature, to build domestic regulation and international treaties that protect what’s needed, to negotiate the freedom of the individual in the name of the well-being of the collective. This is, of course, a worldview in direct contrast with free-market fundamentalism and libertarianism.

We tend to think utopias are unbelievable, but this is a sober-minded think tank focused on climate and energy politics. The report made little impact on the general public. Because the energy revolution has been incremental, there’s been no single breakthrough moment. Yet, on the one hand, it adds up to an encouraging and even astonishing narrative. On the other hand, people find grim narratives all too believable, whether or not they are grounded in fact. We are still inundated by harmful, as well as untrue, stories about climate and the future. Prophecies can be self-fulfilling: if you insist that we cannot possibly win, you pit yourself against the possibility of victory and the people trying to achieve it.

We tell each other stories the way people plant seeds, not sure what will germinate or feed or go to waste, not sure what will be heard or who is listening and what they’ll take from what is offered. I say that like a general principle, but people tell me things, or I read them, and some of them are gifts, a candle to light a corner of the room or a flash of lightning or some warmth of sunlight. Some of them are seeds that grow, slowly, in the dark, surfacing later. You mix your metaphors, and a seed becomes a lantern glowing, or a flashlight, or a firefly hatching. It becomes the tiny phosphorescent organisms that light up the night ocean. You say a thing that takes you someplace and then the next place, and I hope the thought of the ocean was of some value to this man while he was imprisoned, that it took him someplace or shed some light. Somehow, somewhere he gained a compelling awareness of the sea, from a film, a book, a conversation, an image, a song, or all those things compounding, and it awoke a yearning. While yearnings are generally considered to be afflictions, they can sometimes be compass needles pointing somewhere, providing direction. They can orient, and to be oriented is to have some coherence, and maybe also to yearn is to hope, if only for the satisfaction of that yearning, and to make your world bigger in some way, even if it’s big with what you do not have. He must have said to himself that he would never see the ocean with that life sentence. What do...

They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.

There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it’s sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.