Struggling to Breathe
It was not too long ago that I heard this fact: California was simultaneously experiencing the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th largest fires in it’s entire history.
At the time of writing these historic fires have cost over 20 lives and over 3 million acres of my beloved home.
It is heart wrenching to see what the fires have done to the Bay Area and surrounding regions. They have turned the sky into an unmistakable orange: a sinister glow that suffocates the residents below.
These are the wild weather events that were predicted decades ago. If we had no prior warning it would truly seem like the apocalypse.
Losing Hope
The smoke had travelled more than 400 miles when I heard that Oregon was next, closely followed by Washington. The West Coast was fading into a cloud of ash and there was nothing I could do.
I felt helpless and, for the first time, without the hope that this would get any better. Surely the fires would die down but something else, some other force, would rage on.
This force felt inevitable and overpowering, so much so that I lost faith in one of, if not the most, fulfilling human experience: that of raising kids.
It was the first time I had seriously considered that bringing kids into this world might not be such a good idea, that it might be selfish to do so because of the increasingly treacherous planet they might come to inhabit.
Short Aside
You may be wondering the following: Aren’t you a little young to be thinking about kids? And the answer to that is strictly no.
I am one to design my life far into the future with the supposition that, due to my young age, I will have a constantly changing metric of success. For as far as I can remember this measure had a few constant pillars: one such being fatherhood.
At this point in time, however, I doubted my conviction.
Questions Abound
Do I or could I bring such pure and innocent life into a world where the sky carries slow and agonizing death? Would life on a planet where clean air is a commodity rather than a human right be one worth living?
These were the haunting thoughts that echoed in my mind. Fear was lashing out within me. The future I imagined, and by extension my identity, was under attack.
I was forced (and fortunate enough) to wear a respirator, not because of a pandemic, but because the air around me was poison.
A sickening gray hung in the air for days at time.
My eyes constantly stung and my clothes smelled of a rawness I had never before encountered.
Eventually, I lost track of how many days I had gone without seeing a blue sky. What I had taken for granted was no longer.
It was then that a part of me seemed to have died.
Did I, deep down, no longer trust us to do better?
Did I truly believe we had no way out?
Did I finally lose hope?
The Other New Normal
Clean air is not taken for granted in other more poluted parts of the world. Already their are countries where masks are a constant necessity.
This experience was my wake up call. We truly have made the planet increasingly hostile to life.
Maybe this will only be one of things we accept as yet another inevitable reality.
Perhaps, and most likely, we carry on, business as usual changing nothing.
Perhaps, and unsurprisingly, we throw our hands up and stop caring all together.
All of these scenarios are essentially the same: they are the result of acting without hope and they ensure that we create a world where having that hope is only that much harder.
Business as usual is to continue treating the symptoms rather than the underlying cause.
Hope is a necessity just as much as water is. I would argue it’s what keeps us alive.
At it’s core, hope is the expectation of a future we choose, or are predisposed, to envision.
As humans we thrive off these visions of the future. Expectations of scarcity lead us to save, visions of a long and fulfilling life cause us to eat well, and our innate desire to perpetuate the species makes having kids a no brainer (for many that is).
Not Having Kids is Trending
We all know the following: millennials are having less sex, and consequently fewer kids than their parents.
Having kids is no longer a “no brainer” and it not difficult to see why. Many feel as if the can barely take care of themselves let alone a mini human. To me this signals that hope is a commodity in very scarce supply.
For the first time ever I finally understood why.
So What Now
I honestly don’t know. I could very simply say “Don’t lose hope and trust that things will get better” but it feels like applying a bandaid to a ruptured intestine.
It doesn’t do nearly enough.
I could also say that we all need to care more but that is far too obvious and overstated.
If not solutions then the hope that I will have them.
The question is truly how to make an entire generation (or two) take a genuine interest in the future of the world we inhabit.
I’m fairly certain that we all know what must be done (in very general terms) but not at all how to do it.
Main Takeaway
Keeping hope alive is a constant battle that must be waged even when it feels impossible. If believing in a brighter future were easy then we wouldn’t be where we are. Thankfully, we can do our part.
Hope, because it is fragile, must be protected. If we lose that, we lose it all.
