Delicate Suffering

Delicate Suffering

Amiri Baraka, world-renowned Civil Rights author, scholar, and speaker, said, "Hope is delicate suffering."

The first time I read this, I thought to myself, "Self.  That is pretty bleak.  Is that what thinkers in Newark, NJ believe?  Is life really that painful?"

Now, after almost a year in the classroom in Newark, NJ, I have come to understand what Dr. Baraka was writing about.

Life.

There is a natural tension in life between our reality and expectations.  In my classroom, I discuss this phenomenon as something called conflict.  In psychology it is often referred to as cognitive dissonance.  In the form of communication used most often by humanists such as Baraka--real talk--this is called life.


While we control most things in our life, we actually control very little.  There is power in both the dependent and independent clauses of the former sentence, but we must train ourselves to be vulnerable to see the power we possess.


We each have a set of expectations for our lives (whether we choose to admit that openly or not).  At various points in our lives, we will feel that our reality has somehow deviated from the expectation that we had set.  When this happens, many of us hope for change.  We  hope things will get better.  But Baraka would say that this is too passive.

Active.

Hoping for our reality to meet our expectations is passive.   When Amiri Baraka called this "delicate suffering" he was not trying to be negative, but trying to persuade us to take an active role in change our realities to meet our expectations.  Hoping is all mental.  It does nothing to change the situation.  I can hope for the rest of eternity that the penny I planted in the backyard will one day sprout a money tree, but it will not change my reality that I do not have the money to live as I want to today.  The only thing that will change my reality is action.  Going out and DOING SOMETHING to ensure that what I want from life, I get.

The harsh reality is that hope is not enough.  It's a great starting point, but we must remember that that is all it is.  We must chart a course from hoping to doing.  From stagnation and wishing to actively pursuing.

Baraka's challenge was to be proactive.  

Let's accept the challenge.