By Arti Freeman
In 1969, five years into a life sentence, Nelson Mandela wrote a letter from prison to his daughters. He couldn’t tell them when he would come home. Apartheid was entrenched and he had been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.
And yet he told them he remained full of strength and hope.
There was very little in Mandela’s immediate circumstances to justify hope. He didn’t know whether he would ever be free, let alone whether the system he had spent his life challenging would fall – but he could still hold onto the possibility of a future he could not yet see.
Twenty-six years later, I had the extraordinary privilege of meeting Mandela. By then, the prisoner had become President of South Africa; and I was a young idealist, determined to change the world for the better.
Looking back, what strikes me isn’t simply what Mandela accomplished after his release. It’s that he had to believe another future was possible long before there was evidence of its reality. Hope is not optimism. Nor a prediction about the future. It is the belief that another future remains possible, even when we cannot yet see it.
Thomas Homer-Dixon titled his book Commanding Hope. Barack Obama called his The Audacity of Hope. Organizer Mariame Kaba calls hope a discipline. And long before any of them, the Apostle Paul wrote that “hope that is seen is not hope.” Different traditions. Different moments. But each one has pointed to something deeper than a sunny disposition.
I’ve been thinking about hope a lot lately – and about its relationship to imagination. Hope allows us to believe in possibilities we cannot yet see; imagination helps us begin to see them.
We talk a lot about the polycrisis: the interconnections of climate change, inequality, affordability, geopolitical instability, democratic fragility. But beneath those challenges may be another risk that’s at least as frightening: what if the systems around us begin to feel so entrenched that we lose the ability to imagine anything different?
I recently commented that I was glad no one had yet added a crisis of imagination to the polycrisis list.
I was partly joking. But I’m entirely serious when I say that we cannot afford such a crisis.
Imagination isn’t a luxury. It’s a strategic capability. If we can’t imagine alternatives to what exists, we can’t test them, invest in them, or build them. Hope is the enabling factor unlocking this strategic capability.
At Definity Foundation, we’ve worked alongside partners addressing inequities across food, housing, climate, health, energy, access to capital, and community wealth. We began to see how often the same underlying systems and assumptions showed up across these interconnected issues. So, we began digging in and asking: what would the future look like if the underlying systems and assumptions change?
We might not have all the answers yet, and that’s okay. Imagining a different future doesn’t mean having a roadmap for how to get there. We can begin with what we know, learn as we go, and allow new possibilities to emerge.
Mandela could not know, sitting in prison, how his story or South Africa’s would unfold. He could only believe that another future remained possible, and act toward it.
Perhaps that’s what is asked of us too: the courage to believe and the conviction that what exists today is not all that can exist tomorrow. Because before we can imagine something different, we have to believe something different is possible.
And that is why we need hope.