“What keeps you hopeful?”
An excellent question for a Saturday morning, sitting outside a café with a curious researcher friend I’d been wanting to meet for months.
“This — meeting like this is a great start,” I began.
I talked about the ways my work manifests joy — and helps my students and clients do the same — which collectively becomes a form of resistance, a protective buffer. She suggested there’s a pendulum of progress that swings back and forth. All of right now is temporary. I talked about zooming out to maintaining the big-picture perspective, knowing that interpersonal relationships outlast institutions. We agreed that community is stronger than any administration.
The conversation was empassioned. “And that’s not all,” I added.
I’d just returned from a friend’s destination 40th in New Orleans. Before I’d even stepped out of the airport, I was charmed by a crossing guard: “Someone classy coming to pick you up, darlin’?” I laughed and said yes, not yet knowing my friend drove a Mercedes SUV. Everywhere I went, there was abundance — and it invited more abundance.
At one particularly fantastic restaurant, we ordered almost everything on the menu. A few free plates and drinks came out because we were revelers for the birthday. The flirty server let us know the chef was impressed with our selections — “especially for a table of six.” Then the chef came out to thank us personally, as did the general manager, then the owner. Even the neighboring table told us we were delightful to sit next to — now that was a first.
That weekend happened to be No Kings, and our group folded into the larger demonstration — in true Nola style, replete with a brass marching band. Nothing without music and joy.
While generosity can be naturally occurring in hospitality, it also was manifest with shopkeepers, cab drivers, and the reveling public. At a bar with live music, I offered the singer between sets a few kind words about her performance. She flipped it — asked if we were musical, what we played. A plus one. Generative. Authentic. And pervasive.
I returned to the Bay feeling full from loving happy times with friends, and full from food — while also filled. Overflowing.
It’s a stark contrast to what this current administration is selling: scarcity. Fear of the other. A controlled world of finite resources to be extracted and hoarded, borders to be hardened, and any other mindset framed as weakness. They model power by extraction. Theirs is a small, transactional vision, impoverished in ways that have nothing to do with money. It’s brittle, and has zero regenerative capacity on purpose.
What I witnessed in New Orleans was the opposite. Abundance is not naive. It is not accidental. It is a practice — one that begins inside. Joy and resistance are not, at first, collective acts — they’re personal ones. You feed, water, and cultivate it — growing it in yourself — and only then can you offer it to others.
The crossing guard wasn’t performing for a crowd, or even for me. The singer wasn’t waiting for the room to lift her. These folks were already full, and their fullness spills over. The chef comes out. The neighboring table stops by. A table of six explodes a restaurant into a birthday celebration for everyone there including the passers-by.
Abundance is contagious when it stems from genuineness — practiced person to person, table to table, set to set. It is a politics, too. One rooted not in what can be taken, but in what can be grown. And it doesn’t wait for permission.
Administrations come and go. They can temporarily redirect resources, inflame fears, and make cruelty look like policy — but they cannot legislate the human instinct toward authentic generosity. They cannot cancel a brass band in the street. They cannot un-charm a crossing guard.
Community will carry us through this time. And abundance, tended first within yourself and then offered outward, is its own form of resistance. Quiet. Generative.
And inexhaustible.