To March Is to Hope

It’s hard to read the news at the moment without feeling a bit… shit.

The tone of public discourse around current events, especially on social media, feels sharper, angrier, more brittle and often less informed than it has in a long time. On one hand, that’s a good thing. I’m here for the public outrage. Yet, at the same time, critical thinking has been replaced with a cluster of brain farts that seem to anger the speaker as much as their audience.

Quite frankly, it’s diabolical out there.

And yet, while systems, order and safety quietly collapse, many (most) of us are still getting up each day and going about the ordinary work of life.

The world seems like it’s literally (and metaphorically) on fire right now.
And we’re still answering emails with “I hope you’re well.”

Strange juxtaposition.

Nothing is new and everything is new.

How can we feel so close to the wounds of the world and at the same time be so removed from them?

I think back to the floods in Spain in October 2024 as one of many examples. Hundreds lost their lives. An unimaginable tragedy. And yet it’s strangely difficult to connect with the death toll…the numbers.

But one story cut through the noise and brought me to my knees.

A young man trapped on a roof, sending voice messages to his mother to say goodbye. Not the photo, taken from afar of him trapped on the roof, but his voice, gracious and humble as he realised his time on earth was about to come to an end. 

That is what reaches us. The moments that strip everything back to what it means to be human. One voice. One life. One relationship.

Psychologists call this the identifiable victim effect. Our brains struggle to process large-scale suffering, but we can connect deeply to individual stories. One person makes it real. Two hundred becomes abstract. 

Which brings me to March.

Because for me, to March is to hope.

It sounds almost ridiculous given what’s unfolding around the world. But the alternative is hopelessness and we genuinely don’t have room for that right now.

And it’s not about the loud, inspirational kind of hope. Huge concerts or thousands of protestors on the streets. 

More the stubborn kind.

The kind that says: the world may be chaotic, but I still have agency over how I show up today.

A good friend of mine, Samantha Chesler, wrote a beautiful piece recently about noticing the small things. It nudged something loose in my thinking.

Maybe scale is the wrong place to look for hope right now.

Because scale is exactly where hopelessness grows.

When problems become too large, too interconnected, too complex, the human response is often paralysis.

Peter Senge speaks poignantly to this in his work on compassionate systems. Young people are increasingly exposed to the scale of the world’s problems - climate change, conflict, inequality - and then asked to “do something about it.”

Some jump in enthusiastically. They run campaigns, organise events, put posters up and raise money.

Others struggle to connect. The problems feel distant, abstract. Not my life. Not my backyard.

And then there is a third group.

The ones who understand the interconnectedness of it all so deeply that the weight becomes overwhelming. They see how everything connects to everything else, and the scale of the problem becomes emotionally paralysing.

The irony is that adults often dismiss this response.

“You’re catastrophising.”
“It doesn’t really affect you.”
“You need to focus on what you can do.”

But those young people aren’t disconnected.

Quite the opposite.

They’re recognising something systems thinkers have been telling us for decades:

We are deeply interconnected.

And that awareness can feel heavy.

The result is something systems theory describes well: overwhelm leads to inaction.

When a problem feels too big, the brain quietly asks:

What’s the point of making a tiny dent in something this enormous?

Progress stalls.

Action stalls.

Hope stalls.

And let’s face it, most of us are not in positions to influence the geopolitical forces shaping the world right now.

But we do have influence over something much closer to home.

The way we lead.
The way we treat people.
The tone we set in the rooms we walk into.

And in times like these, that matters more than we often realise.

Will it bring world peace?

Probably not in 2026.

But we do know something important:

Emotion is contagious.

Anxiety, anger and overwhelm spread quickly through teams, schools and organisations. People pick it up long before anyone names it.

The opposite is also true.

A leader who brings steadiness into a room changes the temperature of that room. Not through grand speeches or forced optimism, but through the way they listen, the pace they set, and how they respond when things inevitably go wrong.

That ease isn’t passivity.

No one would describe me as passive, quite the opposite, but I am far more at ease these days.

Apparently that’s emotional regulation in action, if the self-help books are to be believed.

But really it’s something simpler.

It’s the decision not to add more chaos to an already chaotic environment.

That might sound small in the face of everything happening in the world right now.

But small things are often exactly what stabilise systems.

The tone of a conversation.
The generosity of a tested assumption.
The way someone is welcomed into a room.

Hope doesn’t always arrive as a grand solution.

Sometimes it shows up in the decision to keep building environments where people can breathe.

And yes, I’m aware that even writing that reflects a certain privilege. I feel that tension as I write it.

But I’m choosing to say it anyway.

Because if a 41-year-old white woman living in Asia can’t name that tension out loud, how can we expect anyone else to?

This month's piece was cemented in clarity after Kathryn Hemming’s keynote address during the SJII Connects Women IWD event. There is a swell of something deep, an energy, a knowing emerging out of another period of global chaos. On our darkest days, we can and should take the opportunity to lean into it. 

That said, on a very practical note, ff the world feels heavy right now, a few simple practices might help:

Protect the inputs.
Staying informed matters. Being saturated in the news cycle doesn’t.

Slow the room down.
Your pace as a leader quickly becomes everyone else’s pace. Speak a little slower. Pause before reacting. Calm is surprisingly contagious.

Notice what’s still working.
Dysfunction always grabs the spotlight. Quiet competence rarely does. Naming what’s going well restores balance.

Create small pockets of normal.
A decent conversation. A shared laugh. A meeting that ends on time. Notice them. These things stabilise people more than we often realise.

None of this fixes the bigger forces shaping the world.

But it does shape the environments we are responsible for.

And perhaps that’s what March offers each year.

A reminder that to march is to hope, not because everything is fine (it definitely isn’t), but because standing still has never moved anything forward.