Hope

My love of reading started in primary school and it has brought me immeasurable pleasure. I have laughed, shed tears, been shocked, amazed and humbled by words in novels, biographies, text books and articles.  A well researched novel may have fictitious characters but we can still identify with the real human emotional experiences.

Really good novels can give us all sorts of life lessons when they are written from the heart. People writing about people. We can even personify the feelings of creatures.  Who can hold back tears reading Charlotte’s Web or not root for Buck in Call of the Wild? My last couple of novels have both been stories of refugees, the physical journeys being a sideline to the mental voyage. The common thread I felt was hope. These stories were at their most sad when hope was missing. It got me thinking about hope and what it could mean in our lives.

A doctor once told me some devastating news. Afterwards, she said to me, “There is always hope.” I didn’t understand. It seemed she was taking with one hand and giving with the other, so I brushed it to one side. I have since learnt more about hope and I now realise she was speaking from the experience of seeing other people’s stories, the ones she has witnessed whilst doing her job. She has seen that hope can be the fuel that keeps us going when it seems our tank has run dry.

So, what might hope be? Surely it is not the last ditch chance that things may turn out how we want, fingers crossed? Or that we have run out of choices?

 I think hope is much more optimistic than that. It means it’s not over, that the door is not locked. It means we do have choice,  in mind or in deed.

Hope can open our mind to opportunities. Maybe if we feel that all there is left is hope then we can let go of the constraints with which we have bound ourselves. We can let go of the fixed ideas we have formed,  the learned  behaviour and the external expectations put upon us. In the space of an open mind new ideas can spring, giving us the agency to make things happen. There is freedom in the open mind state of hope. This freedom reminds us we can choose how we will act. Lesson number 13 of the Buddhist bodhisattva Guan Yin goes like this:

“When you want to hate be love,

when you want to judge be love,

when you want to fight be love,

when you want to be right be love”

If we feel all we have left is hope, then be love – this is our fundamental state of being from which all else flows.

With hope can come acceptance too. This can be such a relief. Does it not mean that we have done everything we could and can trust in the outcome? Can we now accept the outcome with good grace? Surely now we can see the goodness in ourselves in reaching this point. It follows then that with hope can come faith: faith in how others will choose to act, faith in the goodness of others, faith that others will choose to be love.

So this is why I consider hope in such optimistic terms. If it gives us the opportunity to think freely, have new ideas, to see good things in ourselves and in others, to reach acceptance, have faith and to choose love before all else, then hope is what it means to live a meaningful life.