Thinking about how when you get to the title drop in Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark, you realize she's referring to "the dark" in the sense of less showy, slow moving acts that build in the background to make bigger changes possible and changes you literally can't see because you can't know what the world without you making those efforts looks like rather than "the dark" referring to, like, terror. That it's about putting your hope in the "dark" (as in unseen/uncelebrated) processes and keeping going even when it doesn't look like it's doing anything, because it often is and you just aren't equipped to see the full effects.
Everyone I've heard talk about this book tends to frame it as more of the how not to lose hope when things look bleak book (which to be fair it kind of is), but not as many talk about how the main push is how important it is to keep doing the right thing even when it looks like it's not doing anything because it actually is, even if you don't know exactly what it's doing at the time.
(The comparison made in the text is to the mycelium of a fungus as opposed to the mushroom/fruiting body. Which is something I low key love; the part doing most of the work is the part you can't see and without which you can't pull off the big mushrooms that everyone thinks of when you talk about fungi.)
