It is said that hope is future-oriented. It is the belief that today’s problems will be solved in some way and some day in the future, and goals will be achieved. Hope can be founded in self-confidence or spiritual beliefs. Hope can become stronger by working on our goals, even just a little bit every day, and celebrating the progress we make. Several studies have revealed that possessing hope is critical to our mental and physical wellness and to our ability to develop positive relationships because hope motivates and empowers us to keep going. Hopeful people believe they can overcome barriers and obstacles. For every Plan A, there can be a Plan B, and for every Plan B there can be a Plan C, and so on. The most hopeful people seem to never run out of new strategies to try to achieve their goals and dreams. A successful entrepreneur once said to me, “I know how to fail my way to success.” Hopeful people view mistakes as opportunities to learn about what doesn’t work and to explore another way that might work. To them, a mistake is just an inevitable part of the process of learning something new.
Hope is not passive wishful thinking. Merely wishing for something without working on fulfilling our needs or desires is like throwing buckets of water on a fire until it dies out. Therefore, hope is not something that can be found. Rather, it is something that we must deliberately create through choosing to have an optimistic perspective, then nurturing and sustaining it through taking action, like placing more logs on a fire to keep it burning.
Some might argue that the future-orientation of hope can rob us from the joy that is ours today, causing us to live mindlessly in the present while we obsess on the future. Others may argue that if our goals are not based in the reality of our actual talents and resources to achieve them, we are harboring false hope, which will only lead to chronic failure and disappointment and possibly even despair. Still others believe they are powerless, completely at the mercy of their employers, their parents, their spouses, the rigged government, their circumstances, or their god. People harboring the belief that they are powerless are fatalists who tend to either peacefully accept their lot in life or blame others for their unhappiness.
Setting goals might seem irksome to free-spirited people who enjoy living spontaneously. I regard myself as free-spirited, but I have to admit, that behind every successful outcome I have experienced there was a goal, even if the goal was intrinsic such as wanting to be happier, and indeed, I have learned that hope is a key factor in achieving happiness.
Happiness has been a major goal for me throughout my life, both for myself and others. Joy is good medicine that contributes to our wellbeing. My mother must have believed in the importance of joy too when she named me after the expression, “happy as a lark.” Because my name is so rare and different, whenever I introduce myself to people, they inevitably ask me about the origin of my name, and when I tell them, they ask me if I am happy as a lark. My answer is, “I’m still working on it.”
After sorting through old photographs one night, I could see how true my answer is. So many of the photographs tell the story of how I have been working on being happy and trying to help others, especially my family, to be happy. Sometimes my efforts work, and sometimes they don’t, but in the process of trying, I have learned that lasting happiness is actually peace of mind, which partly comes from having no expectations and merely accepting life for whatever it is while at the same time trying to live true to one’s ideals, and choosing to have faith that somehow we will find our way to better days. I don’t need proof to have faith. I just need faith.
Amazingly, faith often produces the proof. Seeing is not believing. Rather, believing will lead to seeing. I have seen many bad days become the stepping stones to better days. So I just keep on going and keep on being true to myself, knowing from experience that those stepping stones will be revealed one day through hindsight. Hope is not always future-oriented. Sometimes it comes through a new perspective on the past.
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