Lately, I’ve been getting a little confused about the word hope, it’s a tricky word, hard to pin down. If it’s blind hope, I’m led to even more uncertainty and disappointment. Forever hoping can be a confusing psychological process, especially when we miss out on what we want, it quickly turns with an instant backflip into a story of our misfortune, excuses, embarrassment and failure. If our hope is misplaced then the road forward is full of landmines, expectations can never be fully met and the fear that we may fail fills our minds with a certain doubt.
Humans need a noble path to follow, it’s in our DNA to fight for survival but there is more that’s hidden from us than we know and our job on earth is to find out what that is, especially if we wish to flourish. It’s easy to fall into chaos when we are facing events that can paralyse our thinking, the last thing we need is for global strife or personal drama to shut us down. Humans have a gift for abstraction, for telling our stories, but be wary of the story you tell yourself, if we don’t turn our minds towards truth, towards our search for connection, creativity, art and love then we come eventually, to a dead end.
Why are we always looking for the right time to act, have you noticed how long that takes, we may as well be waiting for eternity to arrive. If we commit our happiness to the future it will never arrive. Having hope is knowing when it’s time to act. Hope is action. We must resist the urge to give up, our opponents wish that we would, if we feel defeated our cynicism can take over and that’s when we wave the white flag and admit complete defeat.
Changing our personal situation changes the world if we act with life-affirming action that pushes it all along. A revolution to pull down stuff gets us nowhere, it only pours fuel on the fire. Hope doesn’t deny that we have many difficult circumstances to navigate but without stepping up and facing our fears, how are we to know our true worth, the values we stand for and what it means to be at the peak of this life cycle on planet earth?
Hope is being real with what’s there, if we deny the realities we’re facing then fear is in the driver’s seat. Most of us leaning into our 70s begin to understand that liberty doesn’t come about by accumulating more things, even if we were to pursue every last possibility, there would always be more. Freedom is a myth anyway, what exactly are we wanting to be free from?
It’s all a matter of degrees, if I only ever hope for the very best outcome then I’m bound to be disappointed. Having the instinct to listen to our own inner voice takes practice but leads to understanding and having the right view. We all have those moments when the light goes on and we know exactly what to do. But the magic dissolves as we become sidetracked, our glow is discouraged by others as foolish behaviour and we slip back into doubting ourselves. Remaining hopeful is more about focus, training and practice than blind dreams.
We need a middle path to walk. Hope is learning to be the objective witness to our thoughts, only then, can we allow the full range of experiences to be laid out on the table before us. Everything becomes valid and everything has its rightful place, then we can move skilfully knowing how to discard the things that don’t merit our attention, this becomes our clarity of purpose. Yes, there are fears but they are very much a part of the pie that makes our lives whole. If we’re boxing ourselves in with the wrong view, then it all sails past ending up in trauma and confusion.
When hope shifts away from basic self-interest, me and mine, this insight gives us the chance to see that trouble is always standing at the door, we can choose to open it or not, and our complaining will be useless because we are part of the problem. This world is messy, it can never be perfect, but liberation and hope will rise when we fully engage with the way things are. Hope gives us space to move in new directions. When you no longer accept your limiting beliefs then you have the power to act.
Perhaps in the end our past can only teach us that the victor gets to write a new history, so start writing yours now. Our disappointments are our teachers, our stupidity the lessons we must face, for how else can the world begin to change? Accepting our failures we grow stronger and the whole world celebrates with us.
Living with change is all we have and when we accept it the burden lifts, ultimately our lessons are right in front of us, in every breath and if we are prepared to master our feelings and observe our emotions we will stop drifting along hoping that the world’s pain won’t touch us. This thinking will never be a true remedy if we want to grow old gracefully.
