On Hope and Play
I recently discovered the most beautiful dead word: respair. It fell out of the carriage of the English language around the 16th century, and means ‘fresh hope; a recovery from despair’.
When the pull of defeat drags us to where we can’t even imagine the light above water, if we could resuscitate just one word, let it be respair. Even saying it feels like air—a breath that’s been held for too long, a sigh of relief. I also love that respair is both a noun and a verb, and so exquisitely encapsulates the one thing about hope we tend to forget the most—that it requires action.
To hope is to act
While respair patiently awaits resurrection, hope longs to be understood. All too often, it is mistaken for optimism or naïveté, a misjudgment that borders on offensive.
Yet, where does the difference lie? Nick Cave speaks about hope and optimism being “different, almost opposing, forces”.
Hope, Cave points out, “rises out of known suffering and is the defiant and dissenting spark that refuses to be extinguished. Optimism, on the other hand, can be the denial of that suffering, a fear of facing the darkness, a lack of awareness, a kind of blindness to the actual. Hope is wised-up and disobedient. Optimism can be fearful and false.”
Adding another dimension, Vaclav Havel thinks about hope “as a state of mind, not a state of the world”.
To Havel, hope is not a prognostication, but “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”.
Havel talks about hope as “an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed”.
Fortifying this understanding of hope as a proactive force, my friend and long-time collaborator Thomas Coombes, founder of hope-based comms, says, “Hope is the belief that tomorrow can be better, if we make it so”.
This idea is perhaps most beautifully articulated in the writings of Rebecca Solnit, who emphasizes: “It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.”
Solnit speaks about hope as “an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists”. To her, “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”.
Hope, then, is both the space to act and the act itself; it is the uncertainty of the outcome yet the certainty of the effort. Hope is not timid but bold; it challenges a fearful retreat from reality with the courage to face it and fight it. Hope is a quiet strength, a soft resolve; it acknowledges the darkness yet still believes in the possibility of light. In this way, hope is not just a feeling, but an action—a choice made despite pain, fear and doubt.
To play is to hope
If hope is an action, its most radical form is play.
Play liberates us, suspends disbelief, and propels us to explore way beyond the constraints of what is. In the burnout-ridden world of activism, play makes a much-needed space for joy, dissolves the paralyzing fear of mistakes, and ignites us to envision what could be.
In this sense, play is not a frivolous escape from the present, but a deliberate choice to engage with the world differently—to imagine, create, and transform. When harnessed for change, play becomes a reaffirmation of possibility, a force not of recreation but of revolution.
I have previously explored the science behind play in activism, why it works, and why playtivism matters. But above all, I believe play to be the most defiant expression of hope; hope—the bravest human trait; and therefore, play—a daring act of resistance.
In adulthood, and especially in activism, we rarely grant ourselves and others the permission to play, often conflating being serious with being effective. So while we’re at resurrecting respair, in our new garden of fresh hope, let’s lay the notion of deliberate dullness to rest.
Read more about the science and art of playtivism; and the intersection of play, memory and imagination.
Understand the playtivism mindset and the six shifts organizations should make.
See examples for playtivism formats; get a list of resources; and a free playtivist tool.
Learn more about the background of playtivism.