Our series of brief conversations and blog posts continues, exploring the notion of wisdom in the 2020s!
Hosted by the Primrose Hill Golden Civilisation Conversation community, we have taken the following motif to guide our exploration:
‘What might we ask most of our wisdom in these challenging times? As individuals, as families, as communities, as organisations, as society more broadly?’
Please, please take 30 minutes to sit with Harry Hutson’s profound and uplifting exploration of the ‘Wisdom of Hope’.
Leader, author (‘Putting Hope to Work’, 2006; ‘Navigating Organisational Crisis’, 2016), executive coach and many other things besides, Harry takes us on an extraordinary conversational arc. At the core of his exploration is the notion that we can BOTH choose hope AND hope can choose us, in its inherent wisdom:
Moments in Harry’s life when ‘I truly needed hope, it was there for me’
Hope uplifts mood and well-being, even in the most difficult of times, and ‘gets us moving, a constant interaction between action and feeling’
‘The emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them……The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong’ (Ernst Bloch, ‘The Principle of Hope’)
We can choose hope through clarity of purpose; through the generation of ideas that evoke possibility and momentum (‘Big good ideas bring hope’); through action and movement; through connection and collaboration
And hope can choose us, in the darkest of times and places, ‘coming out of the ground’, the notion of intrinsic hope – very present in the ‘current speed change in consciousness’. ‘Hope is a life force, out of reach of those who would manipulate it or extinguish it. It’s unafraid of trauma, the prospect of death, and even fear itself.’
Hermes, an archetype for hope, showing up between life and death – ‘Hope is powerful because it includes misery, accepts death and mortality’
Much around us that stimulates despair – we can admit the darkness and embrace hope and its associated imagination. ‘The arc of justice is long, the arc of hope even longer’
‘Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.’(Vaclav Havel)
Thank you so much Harry! Thank you for bringing us, Hermes like, the wisdom of hope! Please do connect with Harry at harryhutsonjr@gmail.com and www.harryhutson.com. It will be an uplifting experience, you can count on it.
Many thanks to all those listening and do please take care. Next up ‘The Wisdom of the Science of Well-Being’!