HOPEEPOH

I see the world as a kind place

 The past week I have struggled with the idea of how to affirm hope.  I have wanted to write about it as a way to celebrate my daughter's birthday, but have experienced difficulty in how to express it adequately.  It became even more complicated after wrestling with a few of my own problems that stirred up some feelings of anger.  

I was not feeling particularly hopeful, and although that is the perfect time to affirm hope I could not find the words.  I started to look for quotes about hope that might help crystallize my thoughts and inspire me, instead it caused me further pause.

Hope, deceitful as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.  ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Once you choose hope, anything's possible.  ~Christopher Reeve

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Hope is that thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops... at all.  ~Emily Dickinson

Things which you do not hope happen more frequently than things which you do hope.  ~Titus Maccius Plautus

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.  ~Anne Lamott

In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man's torments.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.  ~Mignon McLaughlin

 What I found was not exactly a clear picture of what hope is supposed to look like.  Is hope what comes before the miraculous, or is it just a way of covering my eyes to the cruel truth? I think the answer is yes.  To which questions this answer applies is a matter of how I choose to see the world.

If the world is a cruel dark place waiting to hurt me, hope is something that will only cause me pain as it sets me up for disappointment again and again.  If the world is a kind place I have no reason to think that what I hope for is not only possible, but that the universe will conspire to see it happen.  How I see the world is going to determine how I interact with it.  It will influence the way I interpret and respond to each experience I have.  The emotions my experiences trigger and the way I view myself and others will all be influenced by how I choose to see the world.  Today I choose to view the world as a kind place where hope can blossom.   

The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.  ~Marian Zimmer Bradley