We are at juncture in history where we must replace hope with truth

Moving along, chapter 3 in my Book Serialisation journey

If you’re new here: I am serialising my next book about collapse on Substack, one chapter at a time. You can catch up on how this will work here. And you can catch up on the other chapters all in one spot here.

This chapter is free to everybody, but going forward this crazy project will be available to the “enrolled” paid subscriber community only.

The project will be something of a writers’ workshop and collaboration. It will also include an audio version of each chapter, per above, and, once it’s all done, a packaged-up ebook for all subscribers.

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Writing notes

Last week we kicked off by letting go of Hope and observing the Relief that comes from this. I like to write in a kind of “slap-slap-stroke”, pulsing manner, which is to say, I deliver a bunch of harsh realities, then drop in softness and beauty. There’s no real formula I use for determining the right pulse or pace or ratio for this, other than to feel into where I imagine the reader is at as often as possible and I try to imagine them processing things. I personally have a large capacity for holding brutality. So I have to bring in more softness more often than perhaps feels required for my own journey.

Anyway, this next bit - Truth - provides some uplift, some beauty and some softness, and it introduces a core thread or thesis - with two “mantras”, if you like (they are in italics in the text below; you’ll see them). I will keep coming back to these throughout. I like to have about 3-5 core threads in my books and I drop-feed them in one by one, weaving them together as the book progresses. I also like to build up to, and drop hints in anticipation of, each thread. I’ll try to remember to alert everyone to the next one. These threads are also what can get me bogged down for months, doubting myself, going in circles, writing crazed notes in cafes. I have to feel super confident about them before I can start writing. They hold the whole damn thing together.

By the way, I’m noting down your various requests for writing tips, insights etc and will endeavour to cover them off as we progress. Feel free to post more…I’ve also been testing doing the record directly into the post (as I did with today’s post) vs using fancy audio equipment (per yesterday’s post). Any preference? !

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TRUTH

“Tell them, tell them the truth”. 

- Poet laureate and rapper Kendrick Lamar, from United in Grief

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Of course, I’m left to wonder, can we actually go on without hope? Actually, I might rephrase that. When hope is gone, might there be something else - something more useful and nourishing - that a despairing humanity can cleave to?

I wondered about this for many months. And then the answer slowly came into view.  When I removed my own aching hope from the equation, when I freed myself from the tug of war between what I could plainly see was happening around me on the one hand, and the hopium on the other, only truth remained. And I began to see that truth is what could hold us instead. Indeed - and here’s the really hope-full reality - when we let go of hope, truth emerges as a far more gloriously solid and enlivening thing to peg a life to.

The poet, dissident and former President of the former Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel captures this subtlety. True hope, as opposed to the dissonance-making kind we’ve been clinging to, “is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

That something makes sense…

Yes, that feels like the thing to shoot for here!

Illustration: Unsplash+

My friend

Kylie

read these first few pages that you’ve just got through and rang to tell me, “More than anything I just want someone to tell me what’s going on. Tell us straight, Sarah, because what wakes me up in the middle of the night is the fact nothing makes sense anymore, nothing stacks up. That’s what’s killing me.”

It's killing all of us. The lack of congruency sees us spending our days wrangling with false promises, sweeping things under rugs and forever trying to find the fix that will bring the hopeful thing into existence. It. Takes. Up. So. Much. Energy. And, truly, it’s also taking up precious, dwindling resources that we need for other, actually life-bettering things. When we’re freed of the hopeful dissonance, we are suddenly able to get clear on what we’re facing, which, yep, is some bloody brutal reality.

I mean, it’s not complicated. We’re just joining life, instead of fighting it.

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Of course, we could get bogged down in semantics. What I’m describing is in fact a kind of hope, in that it entails a reaching to better. The American philosopher Jonathan Lear fleshes out what he calls a “radical hope” that in some ways gets us closer to what I’m grappling with here. Lear describes an honest reckoning that entails moving forward in the face of unbearable loss and with no rational justification for hope, just the “hunch that we are onto something important about being human.” 

Damn. The hunch that we are onto something important about being human…

This is such a glorious line, don’t you think?

I then discovered that this repositioning, from hanging on to hope to bravely confronting reality, is called post-tragic consciousness in integral psychology. We see and feel into the tragedy, but we don’t wallow in it, nor try to run from it or deny it (by hoping it away). We accept the brutality, radically. There it is. And here we are. And this is big and serious and, wow, we’re all here together and the emotion is massive and nothing prepared me for being in this moment in history.

We look around at each other, with soft, soft eyes, and we see each other’s shock and fear and everything suddenly feels very high-definition and wide-screen. And from this expansive vista we find ourselves with an overwhelming desire to…fully live! To fully live the pain, the truth and all of it. Game on, is the exhalation that comes to mind. Game on, screamed from deep within, with burning, terribly sad tears welling and a pounding ache in our heart.

Part of this post-tragic mindset is in fact acknowledging, as I want to here with you, that this is shit. This is radically fucked up. I find when I do this, I’m again hit with another wave of expansiveness and relief. And love. For all of us. For all of it.

And this feels useful. It feels galvanising.

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I interviewed the spiritual elder and author Stephen Jenkinson not so long ago about how to navigate the overwhelming truth we face. Stephen is a deathwalker. He has assisted thousands of people to face the uncertainty, pain and beauty of the cycle of death and life. “You don’t need hope to get your bearings,” he says, “What you need is a willingness to occupy the fact that you were born to a troubled time.”

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Does this resonate? How are you feeling so far? And do we think this serialisation format is working? Let me know…

Sarah xx

PS Next week I’ll start to phase things into an “enrolled” paid subscriber-only experience. The content is quite dense and will require intimate conversation as we go. If you’re really wanting to stay on board and can’t afford the cost just now, do reach out. I don’t want anyone needing to be part of this missing out.