A Magnetic Field of Dreams

Hope is not enough. Cultivate confidence.

“Everything you’ve ever wanted lives just on the other side of fear.”

The past several years have held us captive in a collective nightmare. We’ve been confronted by the darkest dimensions of the human psyche — fear, greed, rage and despair. We’ve been challenged as never before by the feeling of walls closing in, options closing down, dread that all that we value is dying. This is not a hallucination. It’s backed by indisputable scientific evidence. On either side of the great divide we share the fear that we’re losing the last future worth living.

But we’re not dead yet, and if we have any say in it we won’t go without a mighty fight. The word that most often comes to mind for our salvation is “hope,” but I’ve never felt hope is enough. As my then-eleven-year-old daughter said to me when I suggested it during an earlier spell of doom-dread, “Dad, hope is not a very sturdy thing to rely on.” Hope is what you reach for when you’re already underwater, out of breath and struggling to believe you can reach clear air again. Your spirit is riven by doubt and despair. Yet somehow you retain an imperishable will to live.

I’ve held onto hope like a stray piece of driftwood buffeted by a tumultuous sea but have come to believe there’s a better way to negotiate the precariousness of our condition. Nowadays I cultivate confidence, the conviction deeper than reason and more potent than hope that whatever happens we will not just survive but someday once again thrive. This may seem like attempting to defy gravity, which after all has the last word. Yet it’s more than mental gymnastics. It’s a reorientation of one’s spirit and soul from wandering in a loveless landscape to a purposeful quest in the illuminated territory of an incandescent heart. It’s spreading your roots deep and wide to reconnect with all that still lives, human and otherwise, and taking heart from the truth that much as we may experience ourselves as being all alone, we are irreducibly indivisible, not alone but all one.

Years ago I began a deliberate practice of the imagination that has served me well in the decades since. When I see before me a thicket of difficulties between where I am and where I yearn to be, I don’t waste time and energy trying to figure out how to get there from here. I don’t visualize my flesh being torn by the brambles in between. I don’t wonder how long it will take to get through and how much it will hurt me in the process. Instead I visualize myself already on the other side of the thicket — torn shirt for sure, maybe a few scratches drawing blood, but basically intact. Then I look around at who’s there with me. I’m surprised to see some of those who helped us get there and breathing the bracing air of our shared accomplishment. Then I ask myself a different question, not how do we get there but how did we get here?

In my experience this approach to the challenges that confront every one of us evokes what I’ve come to call “a magnetic field of dreams.” Instead of requiring that we keep bolstering hope like bailing out a sinking vessel to keep afloat against all odds and the leaden burden of our own doubt and disbelief, we feel the enlivening energy of attraction, an irresistible pull towards life. The German poet Goethe had it right when he wrote:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.

Confidence creates its own momentum, a force field that gathers inert energies and gives them common purpose. It’s not fantasy or false hope built on a reckless denial of grounded fact. It’s rock-hard realism in its acceptance of the parameters of the present moment, acknowledging both their constraints and their still latent possibilities. True confidence is feet on the ground, spirit soaring.

As a species we humans are deeply demoralized. We’ve lost confidence in our ability to chart our own destinies and create a worthy future for ourselves and one another. We’ve come to focus solely on the worst of what we’re capable of being and doing. We’ve forgotten or failed to notice how much kindness and loveliness still lies within us and is expressed in small acts every day of our lives — a “thank you” here, a door held open there, a song sung from a balcony as a gift to all within range of its melody.

Behind our masks we yearn for connection with one another but fear our tentative gestures will be rebuffed. The deepest secret we hold, from both others and ourselves, is that we yearn for one another and belong together. “Hell is other people,” wrote French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Maybe so for those moments when we find the world too much with us. But fulfillment also lies there, just on the other side of fear. And confidence, not mere hope, is the emotional and spiritual vehicle that will take us there.