In a grim world, hope is that waking dream

What sustains us in a divided, oppressive planet? Perhaps art, thoughtful people and acts of kindness.

- Rohit Brijnath

In a place usually of solemn business, she wears a gentle smile. We're at a hospital pharmacy, strangers holding prescriptions, waiting for pills to help fix our misbehaving bodies. She's a customer but is guiding an elderly couple in the art of cutting tablets. Then she, herself slightly bruised from some procedure, asks how I am doing.

Fine, I say. We talk. Life, you know.

She says kindly that I can't be over 60. I grin. We pay our bills and wish each other good luck. It's nothing, but I'm smiling. The day feels precious. Hope drifts in the air. On a grim planet, she is a taste of a lovely medicine. Human connection.

This matters to me because at year's end the world feels oppressive, divided, exhausting, polluted with hate. Women in Afghanistan are stripped of every human right. Casual cruelty meets minorities in many lands. Children are killed as adult leaders cannot agree to ceasefires. Shame lies broken in the rubble.

How do we, ordinary folk, manage? To look away from suffering is not an option. The least the privileged can do is to acknowledge the suffering of the unfortunate. To stand at least as witness. But even as we do that, we need to find respite, to feel repaired somehow.

LYRICAL, DEVOTED, REASSURING...

It's why I attend photographer Sebastiao Salgado's stunning exhibition, Amazonia. Though even here a video rolls of a Yawanawa chief from an indigenous territory whose speech is at once lyrical and haunted. "The rivers have veins," he says, "they have hearts. They are being assassinated."

Yet the exhibition is calming and transporting, for Salgado paints with his camera. He captures the impenetrability of the sweeping jungle. The ribbony curl of rivers. The swollen congregation of clouds. His camera is an instrument of education, of wonder, of preservation, of care. He makes you want to save something. He tells you the planet is beautiful.