There's Theoretical Love and Then There is Applied Love

These excerpts come from a recent newsletter I received from the Rocky Mountain Institute, which Rachel turned me on to.  Great food for thought here...

The early bioneer Bill McLarney was stirring a vat of algae in his Costa Rica research center when a brassy North American lady strode in.
What, she demanded, was he doing stirring a vat of green goo when what the world really needs is love?

“There’s theoretical love,” Bill replied, “and then there’s applied love”—and kept on stirring.

The RMI newsletter then talks about the concept of "applied hope"...

Applied hope is not about some vague, far-off future but is expressed and created moment by moment through our choices.

Applied hope is not mere optimism. The optimist treats the future as fate, not choice, and thus fails to take responsibility for making the world we want. Applied hope is a deliberate choice of heart and head...The person living in hope has her sleeves rolled up and is fighting hard to change or beat the odds. Optimism can easily mask cowardice. Hope requires fearlessness.

...Fear of specific and avoidable dangers has evolutionary value. Nobody has ancestors who weren’t mindful of saber-toothed tigers. But pervasive dread, currently in fashion and sometimes purposely promoted, is numbing and demotivating. When I (Amory Lovins, RMI's co-founder) give a talk, sometimes a questioner details the many bad things happening in the world and asks how dare I propose solutions: isn’t resistance futile? The only response I’ve found is to ask, as gently as I can, “Does feeling that way make you more effective?”

To be sure, mood does matter. The last three decades of the twentieth century reportedly saw 46,000 new psychological papers on despair and grief, but only 400 on joy and happiness. If psychologists want to help people find joy and happiness, they’re looking in the wrong places. Empathy, humor, and reversing both inner and outer poverty are all vital. But the most solid foundation we know for feeling better about the future is to improve it—tangibly, durably, reproducibly, and scalably.