Close to Home: A meditation on hope, purpose ­— and litter

My newest crusade is to have the cleanest, most litter-free potter’s field in the world sprawled in front of me on my morning walks through the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery, not one candy wrapper, cigarette butt or beer bottle surviving the sweep of my gaze as I traverse its hills and dales.

My eyes are mine sweepers, extending 180 degrees through the harbor, left, right, back, up and forth. My mission: to find and emerge triumphant over every litter bomb, no matter how tiny it is or clever its attempts to hide behind a bush or under mounds of dead leaves.

Out with you and into my bag, pocket or hand, you Doublemint wrapper! Quit your cowering pretension that you’re just another tree twig, you lollipop stick!

I am onto your nefarious ways!

It is good to have a noble purpose in life, and I am surpassingly glad to have found mine.

The modern world can be hell on hope. Bad guys wreaking havoc all over the planet, cynics popping up in their wake like poison mushrooms in the night, free market zealots urging you to take what you can simply because you can, before someone else does.

An aging friend tells me he’s feeling not only his hope but his interest in the affairs of life itself waning. “I’ve given up a bit,” he confides.

When I look at the wide world of church and school shootings, intransigence and ideology, political gridlock and business chicanery, grinding poverty and environmental ruin, it is tempting to call a pox on its entire house. A voice - pretending to be as rational and reasoned as an engineering equation but with a bitter undertone - tries to convince me it is manly to face the hard truth of how big that world is against the small corner of it I inhabit.

As I grasp my tiny tools of hope and perspective, despair sidles on up, whispering her easy implorations of anger and impotence, cynicism and its companion - greed - into my ear.

None of us not named Obama or Gates or Francis, this voice says, can change one thing in the broad course of history; without a platform or pulpit, we can’t see any forest for all those trees in the dark fading light.

But that voice loses volume on my walks scouring for litter through the cemetery, in these very words I struggle to bring forth and cohere, in my greetings to neighbors, in the open doors and ears of friends who bid me to enter, all my troubles, travails and failings in tow. Tiny gestures all, but gestures nevertheless - specific, purposeful and sincere.

“Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for,” wrote early 18th century English poet and essayist Joseph Addison. One could easily enough collapse those into “hoping to do something one loves,” which sounds like a good life’s work to me, a kind of trifecta of loving the feeling of love itself, loving hope, and loving all the doings of our life which express that hope.

This also includes keeping graveyards clean and the homeless fed and dogs rescued and children safe and clients tended and sidewalks swept and the thousand other ways we float our boats of love, hope and doing on the sometimes stormy seas of our lives.

It means we do our thing, to lapse into ’60s parlance for a brief moment - just one small thing.

Or more like the countless extremely small things that add up to the one small thing of a life, there to stand alongside the equally countless other lives that also add up, over time, like the miracle of compound interest, to create the fortune of culture and civilization that was building itself almost invisibly through the millennia.

One act at a time, like drops on a stone.

Nothing has ever changed the world that didn’t include those billions of small things ultimately wearing away ignorance, injustice and fear.

We come to realize that hope is not a gift but a choice, a commitment, a bit of existential daring-do that stakes a claim that what we do, in our almost infinitesimally small way, matters, against all the dismal hearsay and anecdote that suggests it can’t and doesn’t.

Yes it does. I see it in the cleaner graveyard every time I exit its gates.

Andrew Hidas is a Santa Rosa communications consultant and blogger at andrewhidas.com.