Hope: Wish or Belief?
I hope it doesn’t flood this spring. (I wish for no flooding—because there’s a chance.)
I hope everything falls into place. (I wish for everything to work out—because the risk for failure is real.)
Let’s just hope next year is a better one. (I wish that COVID goes away, that we can stop fighting, and that the economy and families so adversely affected by disease and disruption can stabilize—because how will we handle it otherwise?)
For the majority of my life, I believed hope was phony. A disingenuous way of (unintentionally) instilling fear about what could go wrong. A sneaky way of saying there would be hopelessness if the outcome didn’t turn out as desired.
I heard (so used) the words hope and wish synonymously, even though they clearly have different meanings in the dictionary.
// Hope means “expecting with confidence."
// Wish means “want something that cannot or probably will not happen.”
The more I heard the incongruency, the more off-pitch hope sounded. I decided to clean the word out of my vocabulary all together. Too inauthentic for my taste.
But, years later, I reconsidered. I allowed myself to hear it as something other than a superficial wish after my husband said he was profoundly thankful that no one had taken his hope away during his long and difficult recovery from Guillain-Barre Syndrome.
I thought, instead of a wish, maybe hope is actually a trust in Good. A deep optimism. A directionality of thought. A wind that nudges you toward your dreams rather than despairing against. Maybe—just maybe—it is a knowing that all is well even when circumstances appear otherwise.
Chris describes hope as a buoy or life-preserver. He said it kept him going when things didn’t seem to being going his way. It pushed him to continually do the right things, even when everything seemed wrong.
I am now convinced that hope is a belief in better.
While hope isn’t a specific actionable that you can write into your strategic plan, it is an important quality for growth. It’s a choice to stop focusing on the horrible and start clearing space for all that’s possible.
Hope is not a wish. It is a mental condition for positive change. And each of us is responsible to create it.
A sticky note on my computer reminds me to “just watch what happens…it is good!”
This possibility has served me time and again. My expectation (hope) is that Good can come out of anything. Thoughts are things. Intention and expectation create reality.
Hope is powerful.