The Only Way Out

Midday in the Kalahari Desert is not quite the time or place for a run. With heat rising from 39 to 45 degrees Celcius (about 113°F), most sane people would take cover from the sun, sitting under the lone tree they can find, drinking water and waiting for the air to cool down. Not !Nam!kabe, !Nate, Kayate, and Boro//xao, or any of the other persistence hunters anthropologist Louis Liebenberg has observed since his first trip to the Lone Tree area in 1985. They hunt: Just like their ancestors, they pick an antelope or a kudu and hunt it down by running after it until it either drops dead, exhausted by the heat, or has to stop for long enough so that the hunters can easily kill it with a spear. This hunt is stunning in many ways: It helps explain the role running may have had in our evolution. It shows the strength of human team work as the hunters work in teams consisting of young and old runners, men, female, not forgetting the children either. But most importantly, it shows something very special about the human nature: our ability for hope. When the runners start their chase, the antelope quickly loses the trackers and it would be easy to dismiss the whole project as impossible. The antelope is so much faster than a human can ever be. But the hunter doesn't let go of hope. He imagines the dinner he will be able to prepare to feed his family, and he remembers from earlier runs that if he trusts in what he is doing, he will be the last one standing, no matter how hard it seems at start. And so he runs.

More than ever, today, we need hope.

One night on Easter week, I was chatting with my brother Jetro -- one of the smartest people I know. What started as a lighthearted discussion about Finnish politics soon proceeded to the heavier waters of the state of the world in general. Starting from the economic crisis, we went through one issue to the next, each of them making us feel further stripped from any power to fix the problems of this world. There's no denying it, this world is in a pretty bad shape. If it was just one issue, let's say climate change, chances would be pretty good. Our governments have solved big problems in the past. But instead of one, there are so many it's hard to keep track: peak oil, poverty, loss of biodiversity, a clean water crisis, all kinds of issues with pollution, a raising level of inequality, a financial crisis that seems to have no end, to name a few. Just listing these words on this page makes me feel so desperate I want to hide and pretend I have never heard of them. But as we talked about these unsurmountable obstacles, I couldn't stop telling myself that there must be something we can do about it. I don't know what it is. But there must be something. That's hope. A fragile, scared kind of hope. But hope nonetheless. For me, being human means clinging to hope and acting accordingly, even if in the end, we might fail. And this time, the odds really are against us. Failure is more than an option, it is the likely outcome. But unless we try to reach the unreachable and to build a sustainable world for our children to live in, we are not being true to our humanity. Right now, more than anything, we need to cultivate hope. By hanging out with people who believe making a difference is possible. By getting down to work and building on top of small victories. By taking initiative and jumping right in. That is our only way out.