Happy New Year!

As so often, on a personal and family level I embark on a new year full of hope in what we can achieve, the vegetables to be grown, the improvements to the house and garden, the films I will help J to make, the weight I will (perhaps) lose; yet when I think of the prospects for the UK and the wider world, I am full of despondency. A few years ago a Guardian article by Rebecca Solnit led me to read her "Hope in the Dark". I was particularly struck by the distinction she makes between optimism and hope, optimism being the implicit belief that everything will somehow turn out ok, while hope is rooted in the belief that what we do can make a difference, even if it's not always apparent at the time. 

“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 you recognize uncertainty, you 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 knowable, a 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 know 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.”


This also makes me think of the beautiful closing lines of George Eliot's Middlemarch, celebrating the value of Dorothea's modest life, lines which always make me think of my mum: 

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Today's photo is one of the most striking front doors I spotted in my walk around the village (trying out my new boots). I think it's been repainted recently, I don't remember it being this bright before.  I've been collecting photos of the many lovely wreaths hanging on beautiful old doors, with the intention of making a collage one day soon. 

So for the coming year I wish you all joy, hope and the belief that the things you do, however small, can make a difference.