On Disappointment and its Antidotes

My husband and I have a new year’s custom. Every December 31, each of us writes on little slips of paper the things we want to bring into the new year. We place the papers in a bowl near our wood stove, and start our ritual each year by reading the slips we created on the previous New Year’s Eve. Recently, a lot of those papers have had staying power. We crossed out the date we had written a year or two (or three) before and substituted the last day of 2024, expressing the hope that our dreams will come true in the next 12 months. We’ll see.

There’s also room for the things we want to leave behind in the year just ending. Aches and pains make the list, kvetches and grumbles that have collected in dusty corners of our hearts and minds. For me, though, the last year or two have put one thing on the head of my personal list: I’d like to leave my disappointment behind.

Political disappointment features prominently. I’m obviously in good company dreading the many vengeful and cruel misfortunes Trump has promised to inflict on the body politic, especially its constituents who lack economic and social power. But it’s not as if my disappointment would dissolve had Kamala Harris been elected. It goes much deeper, rooted in generational experience. Plainly put, it’s hard for many people in my age cohort, the ones who became political thinkers and activists in the sixties, to accept how far the wheel has turned, with the revolution of rising expectations we fostered eliding over the decades into a sorry mess of oligarchy, kakistocracy, and authoritarianism.

It didn’t take that long to see our dreams would not quickly come true. When Reagan became president in 1980, we had to face the fact that most voters did not share our commitments to social, political, environmental, and cultural justice. We were young, and therefore naive. We gave more to the skills of expression that understanding and persuasion. The accomplishments seeded in the sixties are nothing to sneeze at: same-sex marriage, legalized marijuana, organic food, and more. These reflect changes in cultural attitudes driven by young people who saw that it was possible to broaden our collective definitions of freedom and well-being. What didn’t change nearly as much as we hoped are harder-edged issues: economic justice, gender justice, racial justice. By now we’ve seen many examples of the progress that was made in earlier years being undone: censorship in libraries and schools; reproductive rights overturned, immigrants ejected.

So yes, I accept what has come to pass and see the role that people like me played in it by not clearly grasping what might have persuaded a majority of voters to support political, economic, cultural, and environmental democracy. I also accept the truth that disappointment is grounded in expectation. Those who counsel hope without expectation are obviously more emotionally evolved than I. And there is no denying that the future cannot be known, and events we may not now forsee may turn the wheel again, this time toward liberation. All true.

But what I have had to accept weighs heavily on my heart. I’m not at all sure how to lighten the load, although I understand and admire those who greet this state of affairs with renewed vigor for collective action. I may not have the energy I possessed decades ago, but people of all ages are active in groups like Third Act and Indivisible, mobilizing to bring about that day Leonard Cohen promised in “Democracy“: “Democracy is coming to the USA.” I hope I see it.

I still believe in the sixties idea, prefiguration, which says that to the greatest extent possible, we should act today as if the world we wish to cocreate were already here. As Paul Goodman, one of the angels in my book In The Camp of Angels of Freedom, put it, “Free action is to live in present society as if it were a natural society,” finding ways to inhabit the world we desire even as it is being born. So I defy the disappointed voice in my head by writing a new book, making new paintings, helping those who ask for it, sharing love and compassion, and trying always to speak my truths regardless of those who would like people like me to remain silent and passive.

As the great 18th century teacher Rebbe Nachman of Bratslov said, “The antidote to despair is to remember the world to come.” This is a paradox since we can’t remember what has not yet occurred. But I think I see what he meant: the antidote to despair is a taste of a perfected world, of the experiences that remind us what it is to feel entirely alive. Those are still within my grasp, and yours too.

My hope for this year is that as time passes, my disappointment will weaken its grip and my ability to stay present without expectation will strengthen. If you want that too, I welcome your companionship.

Leonard Cohen, “Democracy.”