Hope: A feeling of expectation or desire for a thing to happen.

Hope: To place a trust.

Hope:  To wait for or look for something or someone.

Hope: The light at the end of the tunnel.

In many ways, the last five years have been crash course in what it means to be human. Through pandemic and political upheaval, we have seen our human vulnerability, fear, anxiety, compassion, and generosity on full display.  It is really up to us what we want to take from these experiences to carry with us into the future. My hope is that I am becoming a more patient, compassionate person, a person who doesn’t take the seemingly ‘little things’ for granted.

Hope: An expectation and a wish.

 We know there is more to hope than looking on the bright side, right? Hope isn’t a simple equation that if we think positive, good things will happen. There is no magic formula that will 100% result in our hopes being realized. In fact, it is almost impossible to describe exactly what hope is. Over the centuries – millennia even – some of the greatest thinkers and artists have tried to grasp hold of it.

Emily Dickinson ~ Hope is the things with feathers – That perches on the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops at all.  

Pliny the Elder – Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.

Desmond Tutu ~ Hope is being able to see that there is light despite the darkness.

Aristotle ~ Hope is a waking dream.

Rebecca Solnit – Hope is the embrace of the unknown and the unknowable.

Soren Kierkegaard ~ Hope is a passion for the possible.

From the poetic to the philosophical to the theological, hope refuses to be reduced. Hope eludes definition, which might suggest that hope means something different to each of us. Perhaps hope is one of those “you know it when you see it” kind of things….. or maybe, conversely, hope can be best understood in its absence.

Like many people, I have experienced times of hopelessness. For years I lived with undiagnosed PTSD after a violent assault. When I was in the midst of my worst PTSD symptoms, I had a sense (a belief, really, deep in my bones) that there was no future for me. I moved throughout my days, ate, worked as best I could, but I felt no hope. The future was a blank. I later learned that this is a common symptom of PTSD called foreshortened future. At the time, though, it just felt like hopelessness.

I confided in my counselor, who did not dismiss my feelings or tell me to look on the bright side. She took my concerns seriously which is, I think, one of the most important things we can do for each other. Then, over the course of several weeks, she asked me to join her in an exercise. She invited me to ~ slowly ~ step forward into the future that was a blank and see what I found.

This was a profound experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life. I discovered, as I visualized stepping into the unknown, that I was not alone. That even in my bleakest imaginings, there was love, even in the deepest darkness, there was beauty.  As Anne Lamott writes about life, “This stuff is scary and it’s very real. Yet hope is real, too.”

As I worked through this exercise, the hopelessness I experienced slowly melted away. Where there was only darkness, colors started to emerge. I began to think that maybe I had a future, after all. I began to hope, again. The life I had envisioned for myself before my assault was gone, but a new life was beginning to take shape and it, too, was beautiful. It, too, was real.

In the wise words of Joseph Campbell, “We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” I imagine all of us have had to re-imagine our lives to some degree. We’ve all had dark moments that require us to revision our lives in light of a new reality, to find beauty in a life we had never imagined.

Hope is, sometimes, elusive, imperceptible, mysterious. It can be slippery. There may be times when you need someone to hold onto hope for you, when you need someone to see the hope that, for you, has slipped behind the shadow. That’s okay. Let them. There may be times when you can hold hope for someone else. Sometimes we need to be hope-bearers for each other.

Hope isn’t just a happy feeling. It can’t be summed up as a decision to look on the bright side. Hope is knowing that life is uncertain, that we are vulnerable, that bad things happen, and still believing in goodness and light. Hope is knowing that the darkness will descend, yet believing that the darkness will not have the last word. Hope leads us to places we never imagined and helps us see the beauty along the way. In this way, hope is different for each of us because we have our own unique experiences of the darkness and our own unique journeys to finding the light. 

For many of us, these days feel bleak and filled with uncertainty. My hope is that we have the strength and compassion to bear hope for each other… and that we have the courage, when it’s our time, to step into the darkness and find the light. Even when our eyes are filled with tears.