Learning to Hope

It's taken me a very long time to learn how to hope.  After all, there weren't too many experiences in my early life that led me to think that there's a great deal of purpose in hoping.  Because of those early experiences, I came to focus more on what I felt was impossible, out of reach, and hopeless rather than on those things that I really wanted.  It made sense when I so rarely came to have those things that I really wanted.

Nowadays, though, I see the world with different eyes, and I've been able to shed the burden of negative expectations and finally focus on hope--focus on those things that I desire with the hope of them actually coming through.  It's a great feeling, too--one that's quite liberating, one that makes me feel lighter and more at peace with life.  It's taken a lot of work, but it's been work that's been very worthwhile.  It's taken a great deal of effort to actually shift my perspective and stop believing what my mind and heart were telling me about impossibility.  I've had to change my attitudes and my ways of thinking to include the possibility of things that I want actually coming to pass.  I've had to learn to believe that the world isn't out to get me, and that there's plenty of abundance in this world to go around, and that I am just as likely as any other human being to experience that abundance.  I've had to learn to believe that the abundance is the natural state of things, and that my former outlook, which centered on want and lack, was actually an unnatural way of looking at the world.

It's great to allow hope to function in our lives, completely unfettered and free.  It's nice to keep in mind that a hopeful outlook is a natural outlook, the way that human beings were meant to see the world.  Hope, after all, helps us to create our own realities.  Hope helps us to appreciate what we have and what we will have.  Hope gives an added dimension to who we are and what we have, and that dimension is one that can speak volumes to the other people who witness us living our lives and who see us possibly as role models.  And most importantly, our hope for an outcome or for something coming to be actually helps that outcome arrive in our lives--the positive energy that we expend helps the positive outcome to occur.  It's not witchcraft and it's not magic--a positive approach to life promotes and attracts more positivity.

Do you allow hope to function in your life, or do you squash it like I used to?  Make friends with hope, keeping in mind that hope is one of those true friends who will be with us through thick and thin, as long as we don't betray it.  I love hope, and I love the new outlook on life that it's given me.  My hope now is part of my reality, of who I am, and it helps me to shine brighter than I ever used to think possible when I was a person who squashed and squandered the hope that life gave to me.

Hope is wanting something so eagerly that--in spite of all the
evidence that you're not going to get it--you go right on wanting it.

Norman Vincent Peale