"Hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you create, with your actions. Hope is something you have to manifest into the world, and once one person has hope, it can be contagious. Other people start acting in a way that has more hope." - Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

"We can no longer let the people in power decide what hope is. Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah blah blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action" - Greta Thunberg

Hope won't come back just by waiting around Anna. Hope is like love. It's not a feeling. It's an action that can lead to a feeling.

As for the world that is coming - no one knows. And it's never over until you're dead. And even after that it won't be over. It wasn't over when an asteroid hit the earth and killed the dinosaurs. It wasn't over during the Great Dying when 98% of all life was snuffed out from Earth. Life is tenacious.

Of course you can mourn. You can always mourn. If you need to take time to mourn, and rest, do that.

But mourning doesn't mean giving up. We are always losing, Anna. Even in the best of times. Always losing things we love. Always losing time, always losing our youth, our memories, our loved ones, our past selves. It's right to mourn these things we cherished that are passing away. It honours them.

Lean into the impermanence, and the uncertainty, and realise it's always been this way, and always will be this way. Lean into the inevitability of loss. The inevitability of entropy. The inevitability of death.

There are times in our lives - in our civilisations - when this fact becomes apparent to everyone as if it was a sudden discovery. The veil of denial of death is swept away. The terrible truth of existence is revealed. This is not new. It always goes on, underneath the leaf litter, six feet under, in the hospitals, in the slaughterhouses, behind closed doors - in millions of mundane, hidden ways.

And then comes a time it isn't hidden. And we are all appalled. And we think, as millions must have during the Black Death, as millions must have during WWII, during the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, Mao's Cultural Revolution- that this is finally the end of everything.

It never is though. And for every death there is new life.

Do you know the most traumatic event that you can experience, has already happened to you? It was birth. The most awful pain and terror there is possible to feel already happened to you. And you are OK.

We are the midwives of the future. A new way is being born, I don't know what it will look like but I will try to usher it in with love.