Hope Lives in Uncertainty

Dear Friends, 

Today is a day that will be filled with complicated emotions. Some of us will be compulsively tuned in to the news, while others will be studiously avoiding it. Whatever your tactic is, we hope you’ll keep your chin up and your heart open. Today will surely influence the future, but it will not be the future’s sole determinant. We, too, have the potential to influence the future. 

From our Faust research, a quote from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When we recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can known beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.” 

Stay strong. Say no to Mephistopheles and yes to your neighbors. 

We’ve got work to do. 

— Theater in Asylum

Ps. Huge thanks to everyone who came out to our holiday party earlier this month (yes, in January)! We had a great time catching up with our friends in the TIA community, chatting about life updates and upcoming projects, and looking ahead to the new year.