If there’s one thing that sucks about working with people, it’s not knowing what’ll happen after you’re done with them. This was a fact I had to accept as a missionary, a chaplain, an educator and most importantly, a parent. As much as you want to shape the people you’re with, pruning and cultivating them the way you would a prized garden piece, they’re going to retain their autonomy. 

All you can really do is plant seeds and hope it grows into something fruitful.

Sometimes those seeds take a long time to cultivate, sometimes they sprout quickly and other times nothing happens with them at all. You may never know and you have to come to accept it. However, the law of numbers would indicate the more you scatter, the more likely you are to see growth.

With the current trajectory of our world, it’s clear we’ve planted numerous seeds of knowledge and health. While the wisdom to process information as true or not is still a needed skill in development, knowing how to access timely information has allowed us to speak about topics on a mass scale that were historically reserved for the elite few. And despite the rise in certain diseases worldwide, we’re aging way better than we’ve ever had thanks to seeds of health research being taken seriously.

All this to say that whatever seeds we’ve been planting to improve the lives of society have been working. However, as I mentioned above, we can always find places where those seeds don’t take root. Given the numbers that do, it’s safe to say we should continue to sow.

Unfortunately, there’s on seed that we’ve been stringent with and hesitant to cast: the seed of hope.

Not to be confused with wilful ignorance or wishful thinking, but the hope that if we make efforts, things can improve. It’s the seed that tells us there’s a future ahead and succumbing to nihilism should be last on the docket. I actually like the term ‘urgent optimist’ given by Hannah Ritchie, but a genuine hope that is tangible for people is a seed we need to throw as much and as far as possible.

Call me an idealist, but you know what? 

We’ve tried “being real,” we’ve tried “accepting things the way they are,” and we’ve tried the self-defeatest attitude of “it’s never going to change, so why bother?”

The world isn’t fair, and it owes you nothing, but I’ll be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t want tomorrow to be better than today.

Perhaps having idealists plant seeds of hope isn’t a bad idea after all.