Hope as Your Compass - Fieldnotes for when the world breaks

When everything collapses, we don't have the luxury of feeling hopeful. We're called to act, to go forth.

In times of violence and despair, we can't compute hope. It's then that it shifts from aspiration to action. What we once felt as hope is now electricity in our bones.

We don't have the feeling of hope in the moment. Yet, we embody it. Our body remembers.

Our body remembers because hope is evolutionary. Ancestors before us hoped in the face of certain defeat so that we could hope, or more accurately, embody survival, today.

Remember my message: we live within the limits of our time; if we're hoping only for ourselves in the moment, we're doing it wrong.

Make no mistake, hope is a thread through time. This is how in the darkness, in the broken, hope becomes survivalist. Hope embodied becomes small actions that assert meaning when meaning is blown to hell.

How does hope lead us during survival through the absolute worst—violence, war, starvation? Here are tried and tested Fieldnotes:

1. Protect your spark, and the spark in others

Even one act of care is defiance against despair.

• Find safety first—physical if possible (shelter, distance, silence).

• Preserve breath and body: Breathe, drink, rest in moments you can.

• Anchor to something real: a sound, texture, face, or word that reminds you you exist.

2. Name what is true

Hope doesn’t mean pretending.

• Speak or write: “This is happening.”

• Naming truth prevents isolation inside the chaos.

• If you can, share your witness—even to one other person. It turns suffering into testimony.

3. Choose one humane act

Hope survives through behavior, not optimism.

• Offer water. Wrap a wound. Hold someone’s hand.

• Any act of mercy—to yourself or another—interrupts the logic of violence.

4. Create micro‑order

Theft, violence, war, and starvation erase predictability; hope rebuilds it in fragments.

• Establish tiny routines: cleaning, prayer, journal lines, counting breaths.

• These re‑teach the body that tomorrow still exists.

5. Connect

Hopelessness thrives in isolation.

• Look for or form micro‑communities—even two people working together to survive.

• Shared grief is lighter than solitary despair.

6. Remember the larger story

Even in catastrophe, humans carry continuity.

• Recall ancestral endurance: people have lived through unimaginable loss and rebuilt.

• You are part of that same lineage of survival.

7. Leave a mark

When the worst comes, hope often means memory.

• Record names, draw symbols, hide a note, teach a child a song.

• It says: “We were here. We mattered.”

8. Let hope change shape

In good times, hope looks like plans. In terrible times, it looks like endurance.

Sometimes hope means staying alive for one more dawn, one more person, one more story.

Even one act of care is defiance against despair.