I fall for fool’s spring every year because I’m addicted to hope and believing that life will get better.
It’s something I see someone say online and it’s compelling enough at the moment for me to bookmark it on the off chance that I might want to revisit it later. I do this often, searching for and collecting small anecdotes online — the platform doesn’t matter, it happens on them all. Periodically, which is actually quite often, if I’m being fully transparent, they inspire me to write a piece like this or are simply something I want to treasure in some corner on my phone, peeking in at them every now and then. They’re small reminders of kindness or love, ones that don’t have to happen to me, but ones I can still carry with me anyway.
Sometimes it’s something that feels deeply nostalgic — a feeling I write about and reference much too often — or sometimes it’s something that analyzes a form of media with a thoughtful intricacy unable to have been manifested by myself. Almost always though, it’s something that feels like, or reminds me of, hope.
It’s little acts like the one above, wishing for the sun to stay out a little longer to keep away the cold, though we know its attempt is futile. Other times it’s a short recollection of someone sharing a moment of their day, like a teacher sharing how a student thanked them for wanting “to write something that tender” after sharing a sweet poem.
More rarely, these congregated thoughts and opinions are celebrated widely, far beyond those in my close circle. It’s the message of Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins — that just a single spark of hope is still enough to carry on and transcend time. A delayed fruition perhaps, but one still immensely worthwhile.
Other times, these bookmarked and saved stories and narratives are much larger, forged into prose by my fellow writers and peers. They discuss the politics of hope, defend empathy amidst bleakness and selfishness, and detail and celebrate quiet successes. I like to think they’d all fall for fool’s spring too.
Though, to make it explicitly clear, I don’t believe hope to be a game for fool’s. Rather, I think it takes a certain degree of grit and resolve to search relentlessly for hope, but I do think there’s a shared tenderness amongst all these things.
Believing fully in the onset of spring and its promise of warmth, in the season’s very own filter, making everything bad less so, is a direct parallel to helping sustain hope in today’s social and political climate.
Reading a fictional novel tackling the detrimental ramifications of propaganda, learning greater context about characters that have existed in our heads and on our screens for years and years is a direct parallel to fighting against the use of AI in every aspect and sphere of our lives, hoping that people will instead focus on real art made by real people.
Welcoming hope into our politics in the aspiration that it may one day be the standard, urging for the extension of empathy to those who are the most vulnerable and those who we may not agree with, looking for the good, and finding it — it’s all a direct parallel to waiting for spring to come, believing it might be right on our doorstep after a certain twinge of light.
Don’t you see? They’re all interconnected actions, all worthwhile dreams and wishes. Their actualization might not be immediate, but hope isn’t a finite resource or a feeling that expires or something that can dissipate completely. We don’t even always have to feel it or see it, maybe it moves on to someone else who can carry it.