No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain

by Rebecca Solnit

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.