To hope is to gamble. It is to bet on the future, 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.

I say all of this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the couch and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures, and the grinding down of the poor and marginal.

Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action, action is impossible without hope.

At the beginning of his massive 1930s treatise on hope, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, "The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong."

To hope is to give yourself the future, and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable. Anything could happen, and whether or not we act on it has everything to do with it.

-Rebecca Solnit; Hope in the Dark