No matter what crises are going on in the world, the seasons reliably change more or less on schedule.. Actually, a meteorologist friend informed me that this is the earliest spring ever recorded. Early or late, it’s welcomes, for spring is reputedly a season of hope – seeds come to life, flowers bloom. But hope feels increasingly difficult these days when war ravages so much of the world and in our own divided country hatred has a megaphone. For those who have lost a loved one, the beauty of spring can be even more difficult. My husband died in the gray starkness of winter, which matched the grayness within those of us who had lost him. It felt especially cruel to me that my sister died on an April day that was filled with nature coming back to life.
So how do we manage to feel hopeful? I once read an anecdote about a man stumbling in a dark room, crying that he had nothing left. “Turn on the light,” a voice said. When he did, he was amazed to see that the room was filled with jewels. They didn’t suddenly materialize, they had been there all along – but he had to be able to see them.
We have to recognize the hopeful things we’re often blind to. Yesterday I was struggling to push my overloaded shopping cart up the muddy slope outside my house, exertion made worse by my being in a “nobody cares” syndrome. Then a neighbor I’ve barely ever spoken to asked if I wanted help. I suddenly felt a surge of hope that I wasn’t as alone as I’d thought. The moment might have slipped by and an hour later I might have felt hopeless about something else .But I’m learning to recognize when something positive happens. We tend to tell ourselves anything good was a fluke, an aberration, and far too small to compensate for a feeling of loneliness. But hope doesn’t usually come in large packages. If may be moments, acts, words so slight we ignore then or disregard their value.
So we have to take time to notice– and to say, okay maybe most of the week was bad but this hopeful thing happened. Maybe the friend we’d given up on calls us, or a holiday recipe we’ve never had success with turns into our most popular dish. We also tend to dismiss the good with a cynical ”so what, it won’t happen again.” But ”never again” is a sure recipe for despair!
Each night I challenge myself to find three things in the day that I can give thanks for. Admittedly it’s sometimes a struggle to find even one, but there’s usually something if we look for it. A friend once complained that the only thing she could think of was that she’d had a good breakfast. (When so many are starving, breakfast is no small blessing.)
“Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson famously wrote. But our feathered friends fly past swiftly. The ability to recognize even fleeting hope is the light we turn on for ourselves.
Website: annehosansky.com
Current book: ARISING -available in print and E versions, at BookBaby.com and Amazon.com.