Staying in the Boat: A Practice for Hard Seasons
Hope Takes Practice
The meeting room was quiet in a way that didn’t feel like reverence. It felt like dread. We’d borrowed the space from the church, a place to meet, nothing more, but everyone was there, all of us together in one room, and that fact alone told people something was coming before I said a word. Outside, the parking lot was full of company trucks and company cars parked in uneven rows, engines off, everyone already inside and waiting. It was early 2008. People sat there that morning the way you sit when you already suspect the news isn’t good — still, watchful, bracing.
They were right to brace. The housing bubble burst that winter, and in the space of three months, Varment Guard lost half its residential customer base. Half. We’d built the company on people buying houses, selling houses, refinancing houses, renovating houses, and on the ongoing maintenance that kept those houses sealed up and pest-free year-round — the kind of steady contract work that depends entirely on people owning and caring for property in the first place. When nobody’s buying or selling or refinancing or renovating anything, that maintenance work doesn’t slow down gradually. It disappears.
So we had the real conversation, right there in that room. Not the version where you reassure everyone and hope it blows over, but the one where you say out loud that benefits are getting reduced, paychecks might be late some weeks, every expense that isn’t keeping a truck on the road or a roof over someone’s head is getting cut, and the only way through is together. What I didn’t say out loud that day was that my wife at the time and I had already maxed out our personal credit cards and tapped our line of credit to keep things afloat — that part of the story was mine to carry, not theirs. We went through what could go and what couldn’t, who we’d call personally to try to win back, what it would take to make the phone ring again. It was painful, and it stayed painful longer than any of us wanted, mostly because none of it was business as usual. People who’d been with us for years were taking real hits, and I felt every one of those hits land. But something happened in that room I didn’t fully understand until years later: people stopped pulling against each other and started pulling toward one thing, which was survival, plain and simple. That shared pull carried more weight than any incentive plan ever had.
Here’s what I learned that week and have never unlearned. People don’t follow your plan first, they follow your face. Tell a room of frightened people that everything’s fine while your hands are shaking, and the room will be more frightened in five minutes than it was when you walked in. But stand up and say plainly, here’s where we’re going and we’re going there together, and mean it, and the people who trust you will get in the boat with you. There’s an old image about who reaches for the lifevest first when the ship is taking on water. If the leader grabs theirs before anyone else’s, the room reads that faster than it reads any memo, and panic spreads quicker than the actual bad news ever could. Hope, it turns out, is contagious in exactly the same way fear is. Somebody in the room has to carry it first, whether they feel ready for the job or not.
I found language for this just last week, reading the daily post from the Center for Action and Contemplation, where the Grammy-winning musician Jon Batiste was asked how we lean into joy as an act of resistance when the world around us feels dehumanizing. His answer has stayed with me. He talked about finding a rooting that’s true for you before anything else, because authentic joy doesn’t show up first — it comes from pain that’s already been transmuted into something that holds, even when the circumstances haven’t changed at all. He said the questions worth asking are who your hope is actually for, who’s in control of it, and what it’s rooted in, because hope that’s tied to outcomes you can’t control will collapse the moment the outcome looks uncertain. We were asking versions of those same questions in that room without knowing it: what are we actually hoping for here, is it the old normal coming back, or is it something we can hold onto either way. And then Batiste said the line that’s been sitting with me ever since — hope is like a contact sport. You work on it. You get better at it.
What Is My Hope Rooted In? Reflection Sheet
That’s exactly what happened in that room, except none of us knew it at the time. We thought we were cutting expenses and rebuilding a customer list. What we were really doing, underneath all of it, was practicing hope in the most unglamorous way possible — one hard conversation, one late paycheck, one returning customer at a time. By the time we came out the other side, the company had survived, but something more had shifted than the balance sheet. I’d started locating my faith somewhere other than the quarterly numbers. I’d watched grown men who fix raccoon problems for a living choose to keep showing up for each other when the easier thing would have been to walk. And I’d learned that hope, the kind that survives a flooded house and a roof on fire, isn’t something you wait around for. It’s something you build, the same way you build a muscle, under load, in rooms that don’t feel hopeful at all while you’re standing in them.
I think about that room often now, the borrowed space, the trucks and cars sitting still in the lot. None of us had any evidence yet that we’d make it. What we had was each other, and a decision, made out loud, to stay in the boat. That turned out to be enough.
If you’re in a season that doesn’t look hopeful right now, I’d love to hear where you’re finding your footing.
Peace and every good
Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ alongside his wife and co-founder, Lynette Vaive. A Master Certified Coach (MCC), Certified Spiritual Director, and certified Narrative Enneagram teacher, Jim writes at The Mystical Seeker on contemplative practice, emotional intelligence, and the inward life. He and Lynette also co-host the spirit of EQ podcast.
