Ordinary Grief - the Hopelessness of Hope

Grief is an expression of letting go of our hopes - or our desire for the world to be other than it is - as those hopes dissolve and sink in the inevitable and uncontrollable tides of life.

A series of recent experiences find me grieving.

But the genesis of these thoughts on grief was in my first experience of total grief as an opening. A reservoir of grief associated with killing animals. Something I had done to feed my family for more than 10 years. Animals we raised on the farm. Animals that we treated kindly, fed and nurtured... only one day to separate them from their herd, single them out and then kill them. Up close and personal. Looking them in the eye. Ending their life. Skinning them, gutting them, dismembering them, slicing and chopping them. Feeding them to our children and our dogs.

The brutality and violence. The ultimate betrayal.

All this I had done willingly, without real reservation and only a little trepidation around minimising suffering for the animal. The grief was never acknowledged or even really sensed. But it was stored.

One day, when I had enough space to notice, it came pouring out, along with a thousand other griefs stored in my life, in a stream of tears that lasted days. An enormous reservoir of unacknowledged grief that cracked, crumbled and left me wondering if I would drown, if I would ever recover.

I didn't recover, nor would I want to. Since that time I have felt every grief more clearly.

What I did discover was an opening. The suffering was not necessary. Instead it was contingent on my confused relationship with conflicting hopes and desires that were overriding an innate kindness and compassion. I stopped killing animals and found different ways to feed myself, my family and my dogs. The font of that grief ceased to flow the day I resolved to stop killing.

But the sources of grief are myriad. Farming, like life more generally, provides endless circumstances to activate our complex and conflicting hopes. Little griefs around the weather, what people will pay for what we grow, the fickle markets, the relentless regulatory and administrative burden...

For the past few weeks I have been grieving the loss of more complex hopes - for unfulfilled plans for the farm, lost potential in relationships that I value, and the slow dismantling of stories that I have used to explain and justify my being here now.

I have the choice to sink or swim. Sometimes, even when I would like to swim, it is hard to know which way is up. It has been like that recently. Dumped by the waves of life's ocean, I have swirled, struggling to breathe, vision a blur, wondering, as so often before - When will I surface?

This time however, for the first time, there is a second question - Can I surface without clinging to a new set of hopes?

Hope is delusion

In Peace is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that hope can be an obstacle to peace in our daily lives.

I had recently come to a similar conclusion.

Hope is about wishing for things to be other than they are. It is a form of desire, and an easily accessible distraction from being in the present moment.

Desire is human and probably unavoidable. Obviously, a capacity to succumb to our unskillful desires is a powerful source of suffering.

But not all desires are unhelpful or unskillful. Desire can help to develop intention and provide impetus for action in the present moment. When our desires are for skilful action, and to ameliorate suffering, they can be a powerful force in practice in the present moment.

However, even with skilful desires we can suffer. In this case it is the delusion around our skilful desires, rather than the desire itself, that can lead to suffering.

The delusions include the belief that we are in control of the fulfilment of our desires, that once fulfilled they will bring happiness, and that we can predict conditions for our future happiness. These are expressions of the fundamental human delusions about satisfaction, permanence and independence.

The attachment or clinging to the desire, in the face of these delusions, leaves no room for the present or for an uncertain future.

Recently I have been struggling with my hopes and desires.

We are changing our farm in a purposeful way in response to our values and our changing circumstances. This planning process is useful in coordinating our intention and motivating us to create a better farm.

It is also a trap. It is very easy to attach hope to the elements and timeline of such a plan. Inevitably, our hopes take us away from now, and freeze a view of our happy future. Suddenly the plan gets in the way of engaging with the present moment and accepting that the future is ultimately beyond our control. It gets in the way of accepting our ongoing capacity for dissatisfaction and the realities of future uncertainty and a conditioned arising well beyond our control.

In one short step our hope can become a source of agitation, frustration and misery.