creating hope

February 23, 2025

Creating Hope

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.

====================

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.”

August 16, 2020

Surviving in a Moment of Helplessness and Closed Doors

Before I present an unconventional way for you to think of your value, I must acknowledge your pain. I imagine your circumstances may be far worse than my own.

Those like myself are fortunate. My immediate loved ones don’t suffer coronavirus (fingers crossed), I am in no financial distress, and we enjoy continuing nearness to each other in our small bubble.

For every other pampered hostage to the pandemic/recession, however, heartbreak abounds. According to the CDC, over 40% of U.S. adults surveyed in late June “reported at least one adverse mental or behavioral health condition.” If all the world’s disquiet could be piled up in blocks of cement, it would reach higher than Mt. Everest.**

The world is overweight with pain.

We commonly define ourselves in terms of what we can “do.” Making a living often confers dignity. Status matters to those who make comparisons. Union with hands, cheeks, lips, and bodies have fueled desire for as long as man has been man.

How then does one hold oneself together when money is short, pride in social standing absent, health is imperiled, and touch means staying in touch rather than touching?

You are, in fact, already taking action of extraordinary worth.

First, you are surviving. For reasons you understand about yourself, you retain a portion of hope or a sense of responsibility for those closest.

Contrast your mortal state to that of a god for a moment. In the West, we think of any deity as an eternal being who is all-powerful and all-knowing.

This leaves humanity the possibility of displaying qualities absent in an invincible and omniscient entity who can’t die.

Think about danger. Bravery is possible because we are at risk of physical or emotional harm. The ever-present chance of adversity constructs the platform to display courage.

Man’s creaturely situation requires the choice to endure and persist. Misfortune happens, and its visit is not always brief. The Stoic philosophers believed this allowed each person to demonstrate “greatness of soul” by withstanding “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” as Hamlet described his own tribulation.

To the extent hope is an idea, you have created it. Moreover, my guess is you are amid (or can recall) such woes as Shakespeare put into Hamlet’s life. You know the experience of bearing what appears unbearable, including depression. If you did not, you wouldn’t now be reading this.

Your survival at this moment is a tribute to your character and worthy of applause. I offer you mine. If, with time, you can do more, then do so. Enlarged strength is the residue of a series of small actions.

For now, remember the last eight words from the sightless John Milton’s poem, “On His Blindness:”

They also serve who only stand and wait.

—–

The top image is Meeting on the Beach: Mermaid by Edvard Munch, sourced from the Munch Museum. The second is Hope II by Gustav Klimt, sourced from Wikiart.org/

**Perhaps the most distressing finding in the CDC bulletin is this: “The percentage of respondents who reported having seriously considered suicide in the 30 days before completing the survey (10.7%) was significantly higher among respondents aged 18–24 years (25.5%), minority racial/ethnic groups (Hispanic respondents [18.6%], non-Hispanic black [black] respondents [15.1%]), self-reported unpaid care-givers for adults§ (30.7%), and essential workers (21.7%).”