Hints of Hope: My Biased Take

Making Peace with the Proximate

In our home, bookshelves are everywhere, but Andi and I have a tacit agreement: a few select books are always left out on the coffee table, the corner of the piano. Wisdom books. You don’t just read them; you return to them. Steven Garber is one of the sages whose work always gets a spot. Now his latest, Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate, will be placed in a strategic location for a quick refresher in making peace with the proximate. More on that word in a minute.

First, who is Steve? A best friend and wisdom figure to us—and to many. I write as one who endorses not only the book, but especially the person. I won’t embarrass Steve here, but this is a man who makes his living having conversations of consequence. I’m serious—that’s what he does. There is a long line of visitors to Steve’s heart and mind from every walk of life, from rock stars to business leaders. Unlike others with this rare vocation, Steve doesn’t employ a staff of publicists or social media content creators. He’s just Steve. Which is plenty.

The author of several bestselling books, Hints of Hope is Steve at his most distilled and personal. He ponders an increasingly urgent question: how do we live with integrity and hope in a world that is both beautiful and crazy broken? He is also what I’d call a safe, humane actor. Steve does not offer hysterical optimism or escape. Instead, he invites us to make peace with the proximate—the imperfect where our lives actually unfold.

Steve’s concept of the proximate has been hugely important to my sanity. I feel like I should print this sentence twice.

At its foundation, the proximate is permission. Permission to stop living as though the truest version of yourself is always deferred. You know, waiting on better words, clearer thoughts, more courage, and a more coherent inner life. Or, to use my late father’s language, carefully avoiding doing anything “half-assed.” Dad’s aphorism aimed at a high level of artistry for his son. Its unintended fruit was fear. The language of the proximate does not lower standards. It removes the fear of failure that keeps standards from ever being attempted.

In Steve’s economy of the proximate, it’s loving presence, not polish, that becomes the measure of faithfulness. I may mangle my words and circle the truth clumsily, and still, love can be present. Human goodness and generative growth are still wanted and needed. But in my experience, making peace with the proximate actually creates the space and mindset for goodness and growth to bloom. Something that never being or doing enough, or pressure to level up, will not achieve.

Which brings me to how humane Steve’s thesis+praxis really is.

The proximate does not ask me to carry the weight of outcomes that are not mine to bear. It asks only for fidelity to the moment, the person, the task in front of me. It’s not saving the whole world. Just loving what is near, as well as I can, with the love, hope, and capacities I actually possess—today.

This reminds me of something Anne Lamott recently shared: “Father Terry Richie always told us, when we felt beyond hope, ‘Do the next sensible thing for a person in your shape.’ That’s the plan. That’s all I need to remember.”

Steve, Anne, and the late Father Terry are sipping from the same tea. The proximate allows you to “do the next sensible thing for a person in your shape.”

What will really stay with you after reading Hints of Hope is its tone: clear-eyed, patient, gentle, and companionable—just like Steve. As I said at the outset, this is a book you return to. It isn’t a magic wand for life’s current ills or absurdities. But it does offer a grounded, human-sized hope rooted in a cosmic God With Us love, and the calling to stay present to the lives we’ve all been given.

This describes a way of being and doing in the world for the world. One, that is righteous resistance to the trending behaviors of our time—and that is no small thing.

For readers of Wendell Berry, Anne Lamott, Parker Palmer, and my own in-house sage, Andi Ashworth. Hints of Hope published by Paraclete Press. Foreword by Makota Fujimura.