How I held on to hope last week

Keep your head up; keep walking

We were in rural Cornwall last week. One of my daughters is studying for GCSEs (a barrage of national exams taken by 16-year-olds in the UK), the other was building a model house. Because it is England, and February, the weather was variable. Because it was February 2025, everyone was exhausted. Lunch on Wednesday felt particularly strained: the toll of endless revision for ten subjects weighed on one kid; the annoyance that our lives had to pause for the exams (plus the knowledge that the same exams lurked in her future) settled on the other. There was some bickering but more silent resignation. I felt the pang, increasingly familiar as they get older, of not being able to fix things.

At 3pm we decided to go for a walk, expecting rain, mud, and a quick turnaround. We headed up a steep hill toward the moor, quietly at first. Soon, and somewhat unexpectedly, the fresh air lightened everyone’s mood. The sky was blue, the landscape ruggedly and simply beautiful. Our youngest suggested we all speak in Spanish; an amusingly broken conversation with my husband ensued. My older daughter opened up like the daffodils bursting out of their green winter cloaks, talking about friends, her work, a trip she hopes to take this summer. At one point I pulled out my phone to take some photos. This ignited a round of uproarious ribbing: my kids cannot get over how bad I am at selfies, how “goofy” my videos are, and how generally hopeless I am when it comes to all-things-tech.

The walk was heaven. We traversed rocks and brambles and eventually an Atlantic rainforest, a mossy green maze then bathed in sunlight. We crossed a river and collectively panicked that our dog would not make it across, working together with purpose to make sure she did. More laughter, more lightness. Everything that had appeared unfixable and doomed seemed brighter — hopeful even.

When I moved to the UK 12 years ago, I found my British family’s obsession with walks charming and odd. They walked in the rain, when the sun came out, on Christmas, after lunch, when friends came by. At first our New York City-born kids found it hard—they insisted on wearing their princess dresses with their wellies, and whinged at the weather or the terrain or the length. But soon it became a habit, and now I think it is a comfort. Neither a health fad nor an adrenaline rush, it is a simple, pure and enduring pleasure.

We needed that walk. Of the many things I hate about Donald Trump—the man, the president—one is his ability to insinuate his way into every conversation. Our family has always relished talking about current affairs. My husband and I are journalists: we live in the news. For as long as we could, we curated what we talked about to cushion reality. As our kids have gotten older we’ve tried to balance curation and hard truths: the war in Ukraine; Israel and Gaza; tech that is dismantling our attention. But also innovators and educators, helpers and creators, humans doing remarkable things because that’s what humans do.

But the past month offered no respite from Trump’s cruel, relentless narcissism and danger. Revoking birthright citizenship, shutting down USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, blanket pardons for convicted felons who stormed the US Capitol and opposed a democratic election, purging the military of independent leaders in favor of loyal ones (authoritarianism 101), siding with Putin and calling Ukrainian president Zelensky a dictator, accellerating the destruction of the post-war order, were a few recent highlights. The administration’s muzzle velocity approach—overwhelm the opposition— was intentional and effective. There was no firm ground.

We are lucky, in many ways, to live outside of the US, far from the madness. We have our debates here — will a socialist government further damage an economy already starved for growth and dynamism? — But the complaints center more on competence than cruelty. We are debating the effect of policy, not can democracy stand?

But our family is also American. My kids have US passports and we spend large amounts of time there. My work is intimately linked to the US. My family and 45 years-worth of friends and colleagues live and work there. I know people who have lost their jobs, people running government departments who are managing Elon Musk’s ludicrous interventions, and people in education whose research grants have just been stopped because …Trump, or Musk, or someone else with more power than sense didn’t like the ideas behind them. Many of those focused on equity in education; on improving the country’s truly abysmal learning outcomes; on helping young people in the throes of a youth mental health crisis.

I try to limit my intake of news but I feel a responsibility to not look away. I came of age in the neo-liberal order and with the American arrogance and naivety that such an order could hold. That democracy would hold. That the toxic masculinity of 1990s Wall Street would wane; that the bravado of the tech giants would be checked at some point. I thought we were centering humanity—elevating families, building more diverse workplaces and C-suites—and the arc of justice would bend toward progress.

I’m not so sure anymore.

But I also feel a responsibility to not despair. So we stumble through our Spanish chat, and revel in the Atlantic rainforest and each other, and we keep on walking. We laugh at our dog’s eternal squirrel quest. We marvel at the just right gluten-free banana bread. Later, we hunker down in front of a fire with the rain lashing down outside and binge-watch Prime Target. And we plan our next walk, hoping it might make things better — even if only for a moment.