The poet Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers” and as we see the world events crashing around us, I say that hope will never soar unless we stretch our wings. Hope, like faith, may be a thing we feel, but in my experience, it’s a muscle that must also be worked.
Apparently, I’m not the only one to feel such sentiment. Krista Tippett, host of the radio program turned podcast “On Being”, is producing a series on hope. If you know of her work, she’ll be talking with a variety of guests and a couple of questions that she has posed over time has been, “What is making you despair, and what is giving you hope?”. Just as there is a Chinese symbol that represents both crisis and opportunity, what she has discovered is that the very thing about hope and despair is that they are uniquely linked.
The series just started and episodes will be released weekly, the third having been published yesterday. And just as it is with all things wise, you can listen to the episodes and may learn something or feel inspired, but to more deeply explore the topic of hope, there’s work to do. Ms. Tippett suggests in the first episode to follow along and to take the suggested actions listed at the bottom of the podcast, which comes down to writing out the exercises, preferably with paper and pen.
Hope is to me kind of like gratitude. When my mindset is on all the things I’ve so gratefully experienced, whether it’s the deep friendships I’m surrounded by, the beauty I’ve experienced in our natural world, or the chance that things have worked out for me in ways I couldn’t have crafted by myself, I know I must come back to gratitude (hope?) when things are at their darkest. Stepping into that place is like opening a door to an unexplored room and I finding resources unavailable to me before that act.