We have set out on a journey without a clear destination but with a simple purpose: refiguring the concepts that no longer make adequate sense of life in the 21st century. Learning to inhabit new perspectives. Finding our place within the community of life. Living and speaking true relationship. It is a journey of learning how to move in a way that the world can be renewed by our living.

But the path is not straight forward. Fears can obstruct our journey when they cause us to become defensive or retreat. Fear can wear many masks and burn with different degrees of intensity. It is not always clear when fear moves us, it can act at the level of our emotions, intellect and beliefs. It can hide in the unconscious so that sometimes it is not even clear that we are reacting on the basis of fear, we just hang onto what feels safe or familiar.

Ultimately, fear is a response to the perception of danger – an impulse to avoid a threat. It is an important and necessary function of our perceptive system. However, the impulse can arise whether the danger is real or not. If we face a hissing cobra we clearly have reason to be fearful but in modern society the object of our fear is rarely that clearcut. There are all sorts of dangers that are slow, hypothetical, existential or imagined. If we cannot judge the reality of these dangers they can cloud our perception so that we don't see the consequence of our thoughts and actions.

Is the threat of job-stealing immigrants a genuine cause of fear? Should we fear a terrorist attack when we move in crowded public spaces? Are the perils of climate change a danger we should worry about? What about the ongoing leakage of radioactive material from the nuclear power plant in Fukushima?

How do we become perceptive to the realness of the dangers that induce fear?

We start with bringing our awareness to them. Fear is not just a force that compels us to turn away from the present. It can also be a valuable clue that helps us focus our awareness where it is needed: what we fear needs our attention if we are to avoid the danger the fear implies.

But it seems there is a class of dangers which is difficult to respond to because the way it affects our lives is unclear. These dangers exist on timescales that are much larger than the everyday. They are complex and global in nature. They stretch far into the future and sometimes appear more like a threat to the future than to the present. And they seem to threaten the collective rather than the individual. We use the tools of abstract reason – logic, comparison, statistics and historical analysis – to grasp them and we are not really sure how these dangers translate onto life as we know it.

Clearly, some of these dangers are real and a valid cause of fear.

War, genocide, deforestation, pollution, resource conflicts, natural disasters, mass extinction, melting icecaps, exploitation and slavery, ocean acidification, the disappearance of cultures and languages… Everywhere the temperature seems to be on the rise.

The reality of these dangers becomes overwhelming. It stacks up. Intensifies. There is no end in sight. It grows into an Enormity, the force of which leaves us powerless and seem to threaten the very basis of the world as we know it. The Enormity drains our spirit. We lose hope. Despair.

The predicament is simple: the reality of certain slow and complex dangers points to the fundamental unsustainability of the status quo. And our way of life and the society we live in are key to the dangers we see on the horizon. Yet action to remove or diminish the dangers appears absent for the foreseeable future because how can we change our whole world?

We have reason to fear the consequences of the Enormity. But how are we going to deal with the reality of future dangers which are beyond our control? Sit around and wait for them to happen? Go out into the streets and shout about them? Or simply pretend they are not real – at least for now?

This last option seems to be the default mode among most of those who know something about the direction things are headed when it comes to the health of the planet. While more and more climate scientists are becoming more vocal about their fears about the future, it seems like it is almost becoming a professional requirement to repress the fears that come from looking at the slow unravelling of the ecological balance of the earth.

An article in Esquire from last summer by John H. Richardson, When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job, explores this in a series of stories and interviews with climate scientists and activists. The piece revolves around the author's interview with Jason Box, the renowned professor in glaciology who started the Dark Snow Project, the world's first crowdfunded science project. His work reveals the effect of soot particles from wildfires in darkening the inland ice sheet in Greenland.

The interview depicts Box as struggling with the conflict he feels around his roles as a scientist and a parent, having to face the consequences of his findings on behalf of his children. The language Box uses is interesting:

"I'm not letting it get to me. If I spend my energy on despair, I won't be thinking about opportunities to minimize the problem."

"The question of despair is not very nice to think about," he says. "I've just disengaged that to a large degree. It's kind of like a half-denial."

"Yeah, the shit that's going down has been testing my ability to block it."

The reality of the changes that the climate system is undergoing seems too dark to face. It will lead to despair. Richardson quotes Gillian Caldwell, a human rights and climate change campaigner, who now consults on avoiding the 'climate trauma' she experienced through her work: "Reinforce boundaries between professional work and personal life. It is very hard to switch from the riveting force of apocalyptic predictions at work to home, where the problems are petty by comparison."

The coping mechanism she advocates is compartmentalising our lives. Draw boundaries around looking at the future and living in the present. Separate ourselves from the things we know so that we can live functioning lives. Towards the end of the article Richardson describes it in these terms: "We pour our energy into doing our jobs the best we can, avoid unpleasant topics, keep up a brave face, make compromises with even the best societies, and little by little the compartmentalization we need to survive the day adds one more bit of distance between the comfortable now and the horrors ahead."

Another take on this is Joe Duggan's project Is This How You Feel, a website which displays letters from climate scientists in which they describe how they feel about the subject of their work. There is a common thread of deep worry – feelings of powerlessness, depression, sadness, tiredness, and dreams of houses on fire – mixed with optimism, excitement and awe of the earth. These conflicting and overwhelming emotions seem to be resolved by a will to optimism and a hope that humanity will turn things around.

What if optimism and hope become just another coping mechanism we use to 'block the shit that's going down'? A way of allowing us to compartmentalise our lives and avoid facing our fears? It may work as a way of dealing with the slow and complex dangers of the future but isn't there a real danger that by blocking our fear we let it move into the deep recesses of our consciousness? That it will simply bounce back from the repressed corners of our awareness?

Another way of putting it: do we simply want to ‘survive the day’?

(To be clear, this is not a criticism of people, scientists and others, who are coping with the heavy burden of looking at the complex dangers of climate change. It is questioning whether this is a sustainable attitude that lead to long-term health in general.)

The trouble is that by avoiding this fear we don't have any other way of dealing with it than escape. And there really is nowhere to escape to when the source of our fear lies in the future. How long can we keep up this 'half-denial' and subtle self-deception? Is it really true that we need to compartmentalise our lives and constantly block our fear of the future to be able to live fulfilled lives in the present?

Is there any other option when facing the fears of the Enormity means losing hope?

Could it be that we need to lose hope for a moment in order to see the consequences of our fears in their fullness?

Despair literally means stepping down from hope. The word seems to negate everything we are aiming for in life: as meaning-making creatures we have an innate tendency to make sense of our existence but despair is a state where the meanings we have made break down. If there is no hope there seems to be no point to our actions. Being without hope is a mode of existence which is difficult to bear. Our energies are drained, lethargy and apathy lurk just one step away.

And yet there seems no way around it if we want to face the slow and complex fears of the future that the modern age has given birth to.

Could giving up hope be a step towards a saner and healthier life?

If we can find an anchor point from which to descend from hope we may not have to succumb to the full force of despair and become chronically depressed. An anchor that can support us through the difficulty. A person, a community, a place of beauty that can shine through the darkness when we let go. An anchor that can reel us back in when the absence of meaning threatens to pull us under.

What if despair is not the end point of such a dive?

When we lose hope and faith in the future we loosen those parts of our identity which are tied up in the success of the present. This allows us to look at our fear in a different way because what is it actually we stand to lose? Part of the problem with blocking fear and despair is that we draw a boundary around what it is we think we are unwilling to give up. A boundary which doesn't allow us to see clearly what is essential to our lives and what has just crept in because we are used to it. Then we can't see our own vested interests in the status quo and the very way of life which is creating the problems we fear out on the horizon. It is a double-bind which leaves us clinging on to the kind of life we know.

What exactly is our hope a crucible for?

Because hope focusses our attention on the future it feels like the Enormity means an end to hope.

Is there a way to discover the intrinsic quality of hope as a possibility of the present?

Giving up hope might help us to see the ways in which we participate in the reproduction of the status quo and the very problems we fear. It opens a door we couldn't see before. If hope shifts our attention away from the present towards a future expectation – and that expectation is of something enormously horrible – our actions become defensive and centred on preservation of what we have in the present. Withholding our attention and directing it towards the present, we discover that the only way of ensuring the continuity of the things we love is to grow them from where we stand.

Then we might find that there is a certain kind of joy hidden in the discovery that we might not lose all we think we stand to lose if the status quo does break down. That the things we cherish about life are not necessarily tied up with the machinery of civilisation. That if we live our lives in order to nourish those things we already have what we need to live a good life.

Facing the slow and complex fears of the future could hold a joyful disillusionment with normality and our emotional investment in everyday reality. A relief from the burden of having to defend the present against the Enormity.

Despair and joy are both real possibilities when we step down from hope. They are often intertwined and they can reappear after we thought they lost their grip. That's why we need an anchor point. A community that can help us through the hardship of letting go.

If giving up hope is a kind of disillusionment we need to become good at judging what is illusion and what is real in the same way we need to be able to intuit the realness of our imagination in order to align ourselves with emerging realities. The fall from hope provides a certain impetus. Disillusionment activates a yearning for something deeper and more genuine than the everyday normality of civilisation because for a while we have to live with confusion and questions rather than the sureties of normality. The signposts we used to navigate by no longer seem valid, the values and ideas we took for granted are no longer certainties.

Mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw describes how disorientation can refresh our perception because we need to pay full attention to our environment. And how in the absence of stable structure of meaning a certain longing arises – this "longing pushes the imagination out towards deeper inflections of insight". Attention and a reality-seeking attitude help us to find new guidance and, perhaps, new allegiance.

Once we give up on our emotional investment in the normality of the everyday, it is possible to see that the Enormity is contingent on a compromise that isn't worth making: normality depends on a huge web of infrastructures which are turning the living earth into resources for the machinery of civilisation. 'Keeping the lights on' in this circumstance is a slow liquidation of the diversity and beauty life. The compromise is to pretend that this situation can be made 'sustainable'. So we keep hoping for a cure: a turn around, a technological fix, a collective awakening, a different diagnosis. And we keep living as if avoiding the Enormity doesn't have to mean giving up hope in continuing the kind of lives we lived at the beginning of the 21st century.

Disillusionment is a tough fall. It leads to despair. But it also opens up new possibilities. We no longer have to align our values and beliefs with the machinery of civilisation. (This is not a demonisation of 'the system', it is an observation that our way of life is inextricably connected with processes of climate change, ecocide and mass extinction. And it is much more complex than simply denouncing 'the system' – that would be just another way of pushing attention away from our own life. And let's not pretend that we don't want to keep many of the advantages of modern life!) An opportunity opens for refiguring what we think 'the good life' means. We have a chance to rediscover the allegiance to the wider community of life which was given to us at birth. Perhaps, it is possible to find ‘hope beyond hope’.

But first disillusionment disorients us.

It calls us out on our folly.

It pains us to lose hope….

"If you awaken in our time, you awaken with a sob!" as Stephen Jenkinson observes. We would do well to take grief seriously.

And as we descend from hope, the dark clouds move a little bit closer, the ground gets a little more precarious and the roadsigns are barely legible.

Do we have the courage?