Day 8

(“hope is a thing with feathers” courtesy of Rick&Brenda Beerhorst)

Day 8 – I spent a lot of time yesterday thinking about hope. In a book I’m reading called, Grit, author Angela Duckworth follows up her discussion of optimism with a discussion of hope. She says there is a science behind hope. “This growth mindset, the belief that people are designed for change and growth, is what disposes people to be resilient when things don’t go well.”

So much of what happens to us is because of what we believe can happen. Hope.

When I think of hope, I see the word YES in my mind’s eye. The first title I had for this blog was actually: 30 Days to Saying Yes. For me, hope has been fueled by a million minute decisions to say yes instead of no. I see YES as being open to the idea that there is a solution to a problem or another approach to a shitty feeling. It’s hard, but like I said, every single time I catch myself thinking pessimistically, I try to remind myself that I can decide how to approach what I’m experiencing.

Duckworth reports that optimists “are just as likely to encounter bad events as pessimists. Where they diverge is in their explanations: optimists habitually search for temporary and specific causes to their suffering, whereas pessimists assume permanent and pervasive causes are to blame.”

Why would you be hopeful when your problem looks like a room with no door? What if you start by deciding that the room could or could not have a door?

Yesterday, my friend told me about her bummer tarot card reading. She explained how she pulled two so-so cards and then a disappointing third. It was the Two of Swords, which looks like a giant X. She said, it has different meanings, but she reads it as a big ole NO. The question she brought to the cards was about love and if it’s something she’ll encounter on her trip to Scotland at the end of the month. The big X took the wind right out of that sail. 

It reminded me of all of the times I’d gone out to a bar or party, hoping to meet someone. As soon as I’d show up and quickly scoped the scene, my heart would drop and I’d regret bothering to put on eyeliner and unwalkable shoes.

Or, how another friend recently put it so aptly, “Just once I’d like to meet my future wife on a cross-country flight.”

About the X card, I said to my friend, “Maybe this is the universe’s way of taking your expectations out of your trip. Then, you can go into it totally open.” 

She said, “I’m open to the card being true, but I’m also open to it being not true.”

Later, I sat down to listen to a podcast by one of my favorite spiritual thinker/enlightened individual/practitioner of mindfulness, Tara Brach. Because I’ve struck a synchronicity jackpot lately, the most recent episode was on the subject of, you guessed it, hope! It’s titled, “How hope can heal and free us.” 

Seriously, I believe it can.

Brach talks about different types of hope. For example, the ego’s hope, what she calls the shadow side of hope, is when we grasp at things and set our hopes onto one specific outcomes, how this “robs us of the current moment.”

The moment is expansive with possibilities, but it is easy to attach to one that thing we really want and think there is only one path to achieving it. She says, real hope, the kind that expands us, means being ok with it not happening (whatever it might be).

Since normal life is composed of valleys and peaks, or as my sister says, “good shit usually follows bad shit,” and the reverse, hope has to transcend the day to day.

I see this as being about the moment, but not attaching too much the particulars: a romantic fling you didn’t see coming, a trip abroad a few weeks away, a party with so many people you think you might fall in love a hundred times, OR a party where you meet no one and wish you hadn’t put on long-wear lipstick, or a job you didn’t get that you really wanted, or drawing a big X from the cards when you wanted the tarot version of a green light.