Nick Cave has taken over my life for the past month.
Mr. Cave has been putting out music since the mid 1980s with his band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He’s also a writer, screenwriter, poet, and all-around interesting dude.
His band’s most famous song, “Red Right Hand,” serves as the theme song for the show Peaky Blinders, which I have been watching this summer.
And last week, Nick Cave turned up again in my life, and I can’t stop thinking about his words.
In a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, Cave talked about a letter he received from a fan who struggled to find hope as a young father:
“Following the last few years, I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever….do you still believe in us [human beings]?”
Whether we’re struggling to stay motivated on a project or goal, or we get overwhelmed as a ”Receiver of Memories” for all the pain in the world, I know what it’s like to get cynical and lose hope sometimes!
I bet you do too.
Which is why I was so damn moved by Nick’s reply, which I promise you is worth the watch:
Because I’m a nice guy I took the liberty of writing out Cave’s reply here:
“My early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent.
The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line.
It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people…
…It took a devastation to find hope.”
Here I paused the video, and learned that Cave’s 15-year old son had accidentally fallen to his death back in 2015.
Armed with this knowledge, I continued watching the video and was moved to tears:
“Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth.
Hopefulness is not a neutral position.
It’s adversarial.
It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.”
Hope Plus Acceptance
I’ve written about acceptance quite a bit in this newsletter, as it’s the skill I’ve had to work hardest at developing for myself over the past few years.
I’m now realizing that acceptance combined with hope is the most powerful path forward when we are trying to navigate life.
It’s not just having passive hope that “things will work out.” After all, things might not work out. At least, not the way we expect them to.
Rather, it’s actively cultivating hopefulness that we can endure whatever comes our way.
In a past newsletter I wrote about hope, I pulled this quote from Dr. Lakshmin’s Real Self-Care:
“Hope needs to be “something you do,” not “something you feel.”
Hope can be practiced by locating a deep desire, value, or commitment and taking a step towards it.
…While optimism is the sense that everything will be okay, people who are hopeful have the understanding that things may not be okay, but that they have agency to make things a little better for themselves or for others.”
Hopefulness is the warrior emotion that lays waste to the resistance in our heads.
Hopefulness helps us realize “Even if life is a dumpster fire, I have the ability to endure and survive whatever ball of chaos is heading my way.”
I leave you with this today:
Whatever goal you are working towards, whatever struggle you find yourself stuck on, no matter where you find yourself in the game of life…
I hope this newsletter reminds you that you have agency.
I hope this newsletter reminds you that any progress you make today, no matter how small, is powerful.
As Nick concludes in the final moments of the video above:
“Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you’d like, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes keeps the devil down in the hole.
It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending.
It says the world is worth believing in.
In time, we come to find that this is so.”
-Steve
