The moon is profound except when we land on it. - Rebecca Solnit

You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called courtrooms, but they only ratify change. They are almost never where change begins, only where it ends up, for most changes travel from the edges to the center.

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use. [ — ] [T]ime spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space — for wilderness and for public space — must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.