I Hope So

Hope used to be something that never seemed to come my way.  Sometimes when I would feel a touch of it, I would squash it because I didn’t want to be disappointed any more when I dared to hope, only to have those hopes crushed.  I had convinced myself that it was better for me to crush my own hope than it would be for someone else to do so.

I was wrong.  First of all, I’ve learned since then that in crushing my own hope, I probably killed off many possibilities for things to change in positive ways in my life.  Since I so rarely acted in hope, I almost never had the chance to put my best foot forward, so to speak, or to make other people see the better sides of me.

Second, I didn’t give myself the chance to create any realities that were the result of hopeful thoughts and feelings.  The realities that I created came from a lack of hope, a lack of seeing potential and possibility in my life.  That really was quite silly of me.

Finally, all I had to replace hope with was despair.  Despair is not a good substitute for hope, and it would be my advice that no one ever try to use it as such.  Hold on to your hope–it’s a much better bedfellow than despair or depression or sadness, all of which were common companions to me in the days when I neglected and abused the hope in me.

Nurture your hope.  Treat it well.  Respect it.  Learn from it.  Let it be your guide from place to place, from act to act, from incident to incident.  Nowadays when I have hope, I try to love it, to let it be an important part of who I am.  And when I do so, I find that I’m more creative, more focused, more centered, than when I don’t.  I know that not all that I hope for will come through or true, but I do know that without hope, it’s much more difficult for life to send anything wonderful our way or to put anything positive in our paths.

 Hope works in these ways: it looks for the good in people instead
of harping on the worst; it discovers what can be done instead

of grumbling about what cannot; it regards problems, large or small,

as opportunities; it pushes ahead when it would be easy to quit;

it “lights the candle” instead of “cursing the darkness.”

Anon

Quotations on hope