Earlier this winter I was sitting with my friend Sasha in his Soviet-era apartment building in our hometown, Odesa, on the Black Sea coast of Ukraine. He told me about an airstrike that had shattered a few of his neighbors’ windows. Frowning as he told the story, he then turned his chair to face his electric piano. As the crease across his forehead eased, he said, “But our little song is not over yet.” He used the phrase in its metaphorical “not everything is lost” meaning and quite literally — I had come to his austere bachelor flat for singing class.
We started our lessons a little over a year ago, when air alerts and military squads looking for men of conscription age at rush hour had become mundane. With no end to the conflict in sight, most of my family and friends had already left while others were still hesitating or choosing the right destination.
Each departure drained a little hope out of me. And every day I found it harder to believe that peace and the people I loved would ever return. When I had given up hope altogether, my sense of abandonment was colored in sadness, for sure, but also with shades of profound relief. Feeling angry and powerless gave me a new freedom to do anything I wanted.
It wasn’t the fear of failure that had stopped me from taking up this new hobby before — I had never considered it at all. At 42, I thought the contours of my life — my ambitions and interests — were well defined, and singing wasn’t part of it. Since childhood, I had memorized and lip-synced the lyrics of my favorite songs, but I was never brave enough to even whisper them, let alone try to sing along.
But when there is so much uncertainty about the shape of the future, the only time to do things is now.
In the months after the violence had taken a grip on our lives, we felt suspended in time. I spent hours scrolling for good news or any news at all. Everyone I knew was putting plans on hold because “we don’t know what will happen tomorrow” and because “it isn’t a good time.” We hoped that life would go back to normal; meanwhile, what we accepted as “normal” had to be renegotiated every day.
Having spent 15 years as an aid worker in war zones, I’ve met many people in this state of paralysis. Media reports tend to zoom in on military action, ruins of cities and faceless crowds trying to escape. But the waiting, uncertainty and boredom are an exasperating part of every war. People wait for hours, years and decades, in prisons, displacement camps, bomb shelters, at checkpoints.
When Sasha and I started our first class, it felt as if I had snapped out of inertia for the first time in many months — and it gave me back a sense of control. Instead of waiting anxiously for things to happen to me, I stood in the narrow space between Sasha’s sofa bed and his piano and sang scales. I sang them awfully, but it was something I chose to do. And I was enjoying the moment, instead of worrying about the uncertainties of the future or mourning the past life that would not return.
After Sasha and I went through the pain of getting me to repeat the notes more or less correctly, we started rehearsing a song called “New Moon of April,” a quirky rock ballad I loved in high school. Sung in January, it sounded like a promise of spring, even though the refrain kept warning me that the new moon of April “will not bring anything for us.”
Trying to obtain a brand-new skill in midlife is a humbling experience that demands a high tolerance for self-ridicule. It’s work that will not bring you money or status or admiration. But it makes you alert to the possibilities that still exist, regardless of how grim the surrounding reality may look.
In his autobiographical book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychologist and a Holocaust survivor, described a surge of deaths among prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp around Christmas in 1944 and the New Year in 1945. The camp’s chief doctor believed that the rise could not be attributed to harder working conditions, deterioration of food rations or colder weather. He, and Frankl himself, who was one of the camp’s inmates, concluded that the prisoners who died were those who had hoped they would return home by Christmas. So, when Christmas came and went, they gave up.
Hope kept many of these prisoners alive. But you could probably argue that it was also what killed them. Frankl’s own recipe for survival and the founding principle of his humanistic school of thought was in finding “meaning” to one’s life, which he described as “the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal.”
This was the same hope substitute that I had stumbled across.
Of course, it would be delusional to pretend that you can ignore what is happening in the world around you. And while my singing improved, the world seemed to be getting worse. Every few months, our progress was halted by new strikes and the power outages that followed — the blackouts a perfect metaphor for hopelessness.
And yet, with extra batteries and power banks and a new schedule, Sasha and I always found a way to resume our classes. And this is what I see everywhere these days: people adapting.
Recently, a couple of friends told me they were going to have a baby. Another friend finally found the courage to leave her office job and embark on a freelance career she had been dreaming about. Several others made a difficult decision to move abroad. And my vocal range increased by an octave.
We can’t live without hope forever, but sometimes it can be OK to let go of it. What you find instead may even help you get through.
