Hope and Nyhavn
There’s still this debate going on in my mind about whether or not to write on weekends. It feels like a little part of my soul is chipped away when I don’t put fingers to keys, but I’ve got to suss out whether or not that’s my insatiable need to keep writing or something else. Perhaps it’s boredom on the weekends that I don’t have my kid or am not with Emma. Who knows?
We’ve navigated a month of a new year, with the final days of January peeking at us from the middle of this week. I can’t say for sure that 2024 will be any different than 2023, what with wars, genocide, and politics still looming large over our humanity, but at least there’s still hope.
Hope is a destination. It’s not a natural state for us to exist in most days. It requires a belief in something greater than ourselves across the street from where we currently stand. It’s a many-splendoured thing, ripe with the colours of our different worldviews, experiences, and beliefs. It’s a composite of our faith in ourselves, our belief in what humanity can accomplish, and the necessary foundation of “there must be something different or better.”
When they come to København, many tourists make their way to Nyhavn. Sitting along a beautiful canal, just down the square from the cobbled square of Kongens Nytorv and the majestic Hotel d’Angleterre, it features bright pastel colours on the sides of its brick and stone facades. Each shop or store has an identity all of its own, with awnings jutting out over the cobbles and signboards beckoning with the enticement of brunch and other victuals.
Lining the canal are any number of boats, brightwork polished, wood glistening, water lapping against lacquered sides as they exist with calm estate. With their broad and shallow hulls, the tour boats frequently depart, bearing the gifts of the bright-eyed under and around the channels composing København’s water-kissed alleys. It’s an experience of all the senses: sight, sound, smell, taste.
So, too, hope exists with its many permutations and experiences. It’s wrapped in the guise of the moment need: a new job, hobby, outcome, or possibility. It’s colourful or monochrome, wholly dependent on the perspective of the hopeful and believer. It’s ever just beyond, teasing with the lines of a crosswalk, the mooring lines of a boat, the gentle cascade of water from a fountain. It’s a beautiful enticement to the next block of radiant colour and joy, held “just so” by the inevitable stoplights of our circumstance.
Ah, hope. How I revel in your delectable moments! How I marvel at your riotous experiences and pleasures, the warmth of fire-kissed heat teasing about the circumference of my bearded face. How I long to realize the truth of your circumstances, the promise of a greater tomorrow, a joy more profound than any politician, pastor, CEO, or leader could ever promise, and then deliver. Despite the world telling me otherwise, I hang fast to the promise of your existence.
And yet, you demand of me the entirety of my being. You beg of me the compliance of a bound heart, sworn to the realities that you’ll be there when I need you, but never before and certainly not after. You are, after all, a fleeting thing, sprung from the depths of my despair like the clouded mists of morn and disappearing when the light finds purchase in my shadows and night. And for this, I both love and curse you, for you make life a tangled knot of joy and sorrow, potential and problem, question and answer, and you leave me in the midst to sort it all out.
I suppose this is it, then, my sacred call to hope when all seems hopeless, to enjoin the beliefs I have in a better tomorrow with fellow travelers waiting with bated breath at the crosswalk of our social concern. I suppose I must beg from God the patience of a saint, the ability to shake off the concerns of the morrow from the shoulders of today and rejoice in the present that sits here in front of me. For this, I have Nyhavn to thank, for it has shown me the moments and majesty of hope and her many, many virtues.
May it ever be so.
