The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(3)

I sat next to Jane at the outdoor table on the veranda as she and her family laughed and told stories. The thick bougainvillea surrounding us almost felt like a forest canopy in the candlelight. Merlin, her eldest grandson, was twenty-five years old. Years earlier, when he was eighteen, after a wild night with friends he had dived into an empty swimming pool. He was left with a broken neck, and the injury had caused him to change his life, to give up partying, and, like his sister Angel, follow his grandmother into conservation work. Jane, the understated matriarch, sat at the head of the table, her pride clearly evident.


With my family in Dar es Salaam. Left to right: grandson Merlin; his half brother Kiki, son of Maria; my grandson Nick, half brother to Merlin; granddaughter Angel; and my son Grub. (JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE/COURTESY OF THE GOODALL FAMILY)



Jane put mosquito repellent on her ankles and we joked that the mosquitos were not vegetarians. “Only the female sucks blood,” Jane pointed out. “The males just live off nectar.” Through the eyes of the naturalist, the bloodsucking mosquitoes were simply mothers who were trying to get a blood meal to feed their offspring. That didn’t quite change my dislike of these historic foes of humanity, however.


Angel is working with our Roots & Shoots program and Merlin is helping to develop an education center in an ancient remnant forest near Dar es Salaam. (K 15 PHOTOS/FEMINA HIP)



As the conversation and family stories paused, I wanted to ask Jane the questions that had been absorbing me ever since we first decided to collaborate on a book about hope.

As a born-and-raised and somewhat skeptical New Yorker, I had to admit that I was suspicious of hope. It seemed like a weak response, a passive acceptance—“let’s hope for the best.” It seemed like a panacea or a fantasy. A willful denial or blind faith to cling to despite the facts and the grim reality of life. I was afraid of having false hope, that misguided imposter. Even cynicism felt safer in some ways than taking the risk of hope. Certainly, fear and anger seemed like more useful responses, ready to sound the alarm, especially during times of crisis like this.

I also wanted to know what the difference was between hope and optimism, whether Jane had ever lost hope, and how we keep hope in dark times. But these questions would need to wait until the next morning, as it was getting late and the dinner party was breaking up.





Is Hope Real?



When I returned the next day—a little less nervous—to begin our conversation about hope, Jane and I sat on her veranda in old, sturdy wooden folding chairs with green canvas seats and backs. We looked out at the backyard so filled with trees that it was almost impossible to see the Indian Ocean just beyond. A chorus of tropical birds sang, screeched, cackled, and called. Two rescue dogs came to curl up at Jane’s feet, and a cat meowed through a screen, insistent about contributing to the conversation. Jane seemed a little like a modern-day Saint Francis of Assisi, surrounded by and protecting all the animals.

“What is hope?” I began. “How do you define it?”

“Hope,” Jane said, “is what enables us to keep going in the face of adversity. It is what we desire to happen, but we must be prepared to work hard to make it so.” Jane grinned. “Like hoping this will be a good book. But it won’t be if we don’t bloody work at it.”

I smiled. “Yes, that is definitely one of my hopes, too. You said that hope is what we desire to happen, but we need to be prepared to work hard. So does hope require action?”

“I don’t think all hope requires action, because sometimes you can’t take action. If you’re in a cell in a prison where you’ve been thrown for no good reason, you can’t take action, but you can still hope to get out. I’ve been communicating with a group of conservationists who have been tried and given long sentences for putting up camera traps to record the presence of wildlife. They’re living in hope for the day they’re released through the actions of others, but they can’t actually take action themselves.”

It sounded like action and agency were important for generating hope, but that hope could survive even in a prison cell. A black cat with a white chest strolled out of the house and onto the balcony and jumped in Jane’s lap, curling up comfortably, his paws tucked under him.

“I’m wondering if animals have hope.”

Jane smiled. “Well, when Bugs here,” she said, petting the cat, “was sitting inside all that time, I suspect he was ‘hoping’ that eventually he would be let out. When he wants food, he gives plaintive meows and rubs against my legs with arched back and waving tail, as this usually produces the desired effect. I’m sure when he does that he’s hoping he will be fed. Think of your dog waiting in the window for you to come home. That’s clearly some form of hope. Chimps will often throw a tantrum when they don’t get what they want. That is some form of frustrated hope.”

It seemed like hope was not uniquely human, but I knew we’d return to what made hope unique in the human mind. For now, I wanted to understand how hope was different from another term with which it is often confused. “Many of the world’s religious traditions talk about hope in the same breath as faith,” I said. “Are hope and faith the same?”

“Hope and faith are very different, aren’t they,” Jane said, more as a statement than a question. “Faith is when you actually believe there is an intellectual power behind the universe, which can be translated into God or Allah or something like that. You believe in God, the Creator. You believe in life after death or some other doctrine. That’s faith. We can believe that these things are true, but we can’t know. But we can know the direction we want to go and we can hope that it is the right direction. Hope is more humble than faith, since no one can know the future.”