The key to hope does not lie in the promise of any specific outcome for your life. A truer and healthier hope goes deeper than this. It lies in knowing that when life feels like you are in the midst of a dense jungle which you can barely see through—you can always count on the following:
Right now, wherever you are in life, there will always be the sky above you, though the jungle canopy covers it. Right here, however far away from your destination, you can take off your shoes and always feel the ground beneath your feet. Now, despite how lost you may be, you can start humming a favorite tune, and thus find a little home in foreign lands.
False hope is the opposite of this: it promises a very specific outcome. It promises an imaginary castle in the jungle to live in riches and find reprieve, when it is not there. Someone sold this idea to us. We search cravenly for it like a needle in a haystack when the cravenness of the search is not worth the needle.
False hope is not much different from helplessness. False hope is simply helplessness with legs, running and driven with a purpose from the outside, but crumbling and collapsing into an ever growing void on the inside. Every single step it takes it gets worse when it does not stop and simply pause. Pausing is when progress begins.
True hope is much more present—and actually practical. Not only is it trusting there is always the sky above, the ground below, and your own tune to sing—it is trusting, wherever you are in the jungle of life, you can trust yourself to use resources at hand to make your situation better.
True hope is trusting our “outer resources” are there. These are opportunities or new tools that help us that we can find from the world around us. They let us know our situation is not as limited as we think. These are no mythical silver bullets; instead of looking down along your path for the mythical silver bullet to save you, true hope is looking up around you in the present as you are on your path. It is this openness and curiosity that allow your outer resources to appear.
True hope is trusting you can grow your “inner resources”. These include developing resilience, new skills, or new perspectives in life that can help you make your way through the jungle. When you allow room for hope, it becomes easier to trust in yourself to develop your inner resources one step at a time.
When we close up that space for hope and we get stuck in our minds constantly figuring things out, ironically we get farther away from what we are trying to figure out. Allowing for hope to have plenty of space and room to breathe is a good place start, for it opens the doors of a locked mind trapped in the suffocation of thinking.
True hope is realistic and practical, because inner resources and outer resources are as actual and present as the existence of the sky above and the ground below. They are within us, and around us, all along. When we tensely focus on a narrow path, our blinders prevent us from seeing them. When our minds calm when we open up room for hope, they open up to us.
A future vision is a part of true hope, and in fact a cornerstone of it. But instead of a vision that gets narrower and more specific about the outcome, it is one that broadens and deepens with every step we take along our journeys. As we discover ourselves more along the way, in a curious, open, and hopeful way—the more naturally focused and clear the way ahead becomes.
