At the end of his conversation with Dr Keith Gaynor, Ryan Tubridy calls his guest "a good guy who speaks immense sense". It's hard to argue with the host's conclusion after listening to the clinical psychologist talk for 24 minutes, but when Keith starts the conversation by telling Ryan that he feels hopeful, the immediate response is to wonder if sense is indeed the right word to use. But any feelings of doubt are quickly and effectively eased by Dr Gaynor's description of why he's feeling hopeful at a time when many people are feeling anything but:
"Hope is this interesting thing. It's really easy to feel when everything is going well, but we don't really need it then. We actually need it when things are going badly. And at that stage you actually have to work for it, find it, build it up, protect it. And so I'm working very hard at feeling hopeful."
It's the thing that floats. Or it’s the thing that kills you. But what is hope, though? According to Keith, it's two things:
"It's a feeling, a gut feeling. You feel good about the day, you feel optimistic. And I think that's the one that's most important for us because based on that, everything else can flow. We can also feel hopeful in an intellectual way that we know something good will happen or we can plan stuff. That intellectual hope probably isn't there at the moment."
Responding to Ryan's question about what we can do to nurture hope, Dr Gaynor told him how he met Nadine Ferris France on a webinar. Nadine works with the Irish Forum for Global Health, and she makes a podcast which talks to people all around the world about how they've been coping with the pandemic. Nadine went beyond the notion of how we're doing as Irish people to ask how we're doing as human beings and she observed four themes, which resonated with Keith:
"Resilience, solidarity, creativity and community. As soon as she mentioned that, I said, 'Yep, that's Ireland.' That is exactly what I'm seeing going on around me."
Keith went through the themes and how they apply to Ireland: we've been remarkably resilient, he told Ryan, after a year of extraordinary challenges:
"People have managed to get through it, adapt and cope and manage. And it hasn't always been pretty and it hasn't always been easy, but actually people have been resilient to an extraordinary challenge."
It'd be great if someone could say that all this will be over on such and such a date and we could lock that into our minds and focus on it. But nobody is in a position to do that. Despite that, it's important to recognise, Keith says, that this will end and we will get through it. He runs groups all the time and he's always impressed by how people are holding up:
"People are amazing, they are suffering all these huge difficulties, but actually they keep on keeping on and that's an extraordinary ability."
Keith spoke about solidarity and how he sees stories every week in the paper about people doing food runs and visiting homeless people, visiting older people – all tremendous acts of solidarity, large or small on a huge community level.
"There's something about that that really touches me and makes me feel hopeful, that the front page of the news is probably full of bad news, but the second, third and the fourth page are people and groups and organisations that are reaching out to help. And that just bowls me over."
We are not going to be able to do anything the way we used to do it, Keith suggests, and for that reason, creativity is in evidence everywhere we look.
"You’re seeing it in the windows of houses, as kids are painting pictures, we have on our street, people have been sketching on the pavement, you're seeing it on the beaches, where people have been painting stones. And so there's that artistic creativity that's happening. But also that people are adapting."
Working from home is a good example of people adapting and we've done it on a national scale that would have seemed impossible less than a year ago. In 2019, Keith tells Ryan, people were very busy, running around, getting things done. Now, community spirit has exploded as priorities have changed.
"People are reaching out and going, 'Ok, who can I do the shopping for? Who can I reach out to on my street or in my circle? Everyone in my network, they're all having babies. Who is at home with a very small baby that we can reach out to and do a little thing for?' And these are very small, very private, they never make the news, but I think those things are happening on each street in Ireland."
Immense sense indeed. You can hear the full conversation between Ryan and Dr Keith Gaynor – including Keith's responses to listeners' texts – by going here.
Niall Ó Sioradáin