When you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on! — Theodore Roosevelt

Hope is “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen,”* but it is more than something inborn or simply present in the world’s optimists.

It can be manufactured, and sometimes it must be. We can reframe the world and recognize that “a crisis is (often) an opportunity riding a dangerous wind.” Indeed, many seemingly scary things offer a chance to learn, give your life meaning, and grow from the hard stuff you choose to take on. Despite the worried beginning, one can be pleased, proud, and transformed at the end.

I often reminded tremulous clients of their once-difficult accomplishments. Asking them to list the skills, will, or bravery that enabled them to overcome challenges created a sense of possibility.

Those capacities or personal strengths remained inside them, as they remain for you and me today.

Once heartened by this knowledge, pushing forward becomes possible. “Ninety percent of life is showing up,” a saying sometimes erroneously attributed to Woody Allen.

This means you must attempt what you think is too much for you, too frightening, too likely to fail.

As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

It might be trying a new hairdo, asking the one you desire for a date, facing a bully, or trying a new game like tennis or chess.

Reframing can involve overcoming the tendency to discount one’s worth and, therefore, take on an inconvenience or a challenge. Nearly 90 million eligible voters didn’t show up for the last election. Might they have made a difference?

The fresh perspective on life in 2025 also offers something many of us have taken for granted. Beginning with the post-World War II baby boom in the 1940s, some of us belong to the luckiest generation in history.

There has been no war on our soil, and diseases such as polio and measles have been defeated. Lifesaving treatments for heart disease and cancer were discovered. The water is cleaner, and the medicine is safer. Advanced education was (in the second half of the 20th century) affordable for many, and astonishing conveniences like air-conditioning and central heating made life easier.

But there is more.

The “greatest generation” of men and women who participated in World War II are almost all gone. They knew what the price of freedom was, and many of them died for it.

Our fathers and grandfathers knew. Our volunteer army knows. For the rest of us, however, the knowledge is limited to reading books and watching movies.

We did not live it, and we have not earned it.

According to therapists, one of the biggest concerns of their patients is the loss of that freedom and the chaos of the present day.

The Stoic philosophers of antiquity considered such circumstances a trial we have never faced.

I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent—no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.

—SENECA, ON PROVIDENCE, 4.3

Much of the world faces this test within its national boundaries and some from outside. We are only beginning to understand what it means to act on behalf of our freedom. The luxury and certainty of having it has disappeared.

Most of us know the difference between receiving and earning a gift. We are discovering that our veterans, founders like Washington, Madison, and Jefferson, and leaders such as Lincoln and FDR sent us gifts from afar by creating and maintaining our nation as a democratic republic.

There is hope in the belief that we can maintain that and pass it on to succeeding generations.

I hope that one day, “when you are old and grey and full of sleep,”** you will hear a knock on the door. It will be a child of early school age who lives nearby. You know his mother. He says hello and then asks if you can come to his school one day when his class is doing “Show and Tell.”

Oh, of course. But what I’m supposed to do?

The teacher says we should bring someone or something and talk about it. I want to talk about you.

Why me?

Because my mom said you helped save the democracy.

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The three paintings are sourced from Wikiart.org/ The first and second, Hope I and Hope II, are the works of Gustav Klimt. The last is Good Hope Road by Arshile Gorky.

*Oxford Languages.

**The opening words of William Butler Yeats’s “When You Are Old.”