The Message of Hope You May Need Today
“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
I may not know what you’re currently dealing with or going through. I may not understand fully how your back hurts from carrying the weight of the world around you. Our loads are all different and so are our roads in life. But one thing I know we can have in common is hope. The audacity to think and believe that things will get better even if we don’t know exactly how that will happen. Hope paves the way for our faith to take root. Hope holds us when our fears linger. And it is hoped that I want to remind you of today.
Amid unending darkness, hope is the light at the end of the tunnel. Open your eyes to see that light for as you wade through the darkness, that light will continue to grow bigger and bigger until you are on the other side. Let hope hold your hand when everything seems to be going the other direction. Hope demands nothing else of you but to make space for it – even a little space for with time it will grow.
During those long nights when all your pillow knows is the sound of your cries, call on hope to help you get to dawn. Hope that the day will come, the sun will shine again, and you will find your joy again. It is not a guarantee that these things will happen but you can dare to trust that they will. That confidence that it will be okay is not the easiest thing to have when your fears are out-shouting your optimism. And for this, I ask you to go back in time and remember the hope that carried you through your toughest times. You conquered, didn’t you? It’s that same hope you can depend on.
“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”
– Anne Lamott
Hope isn’t logic and sometimes the evidence of things will contradict your hope. This is not to say that you should not reason out things. Please do. This does not mean that you shouldn’t trust the hope. Please do. You can have both logic and hope. You can be realistic and still hopeful. Don’t box yourself into one or the other. The logic will help you make sense of the situation so that you can make sound decisions and it’s the hope that will keep you going. Have both.
Giving up sometimes feels like the easier thing to do than holding on to hope. Well, it is. It’s easier to drop things because they aren’t working out. It’s easy to give up on yourself and your journey. It’s easy to take the easy way out. Nothing about giving up is hard. Does that make choosing to hope the harder choice? Yes. It’s a harder choice to be optimistic when misery is calling. It’s tough but worth it to choose to believe that things will get better instead of accepting your status quo. Make the harder choice – things get better with time.
Be a bearer of hope. Our world today is filled with a lot of negativities. You can’t scroll through social media or flip through television channels without hearing something negative. The bad news is everywhere. People will keep predicting tougher times. And since you’re a part of this world, it’s easy for you to think that hope is not an option when nobody is talking about it. Be the person who talks about hope and shares it with friends, family, and strangers. We could all use a little more hope and positivity.
Hope for your mental health is important. You live in your head most of the time. It can either be a lovely or chaotic place to live – your mind. The pandemic did a number on our mental health – add the everyday stress of work, parenting, and being a human being – it can all feel like a lot! I don’t know what you’ve been doing to take care of your mental health but please add hope to the routine. Practicing gratitude fuels hope so do more of that – when you wake up, during the day, and before you sleep.
Make hope your friend. One of your go-to emotions. Make hope accessible to you by surrounding yourself with positive people, consuming positive information, and being a positive person. It’s unrealistic to expect you to always be positive and that’s not what I’m asking of you – that is toxic positivity. However, if you are intentional about being positive then hope becomes a consequence of your positivity.
Honor your negative emotions by processing them and coping using the right strategies. These unpleasant and heavy emotions are part of life so don’t push them aside trying to reach out to hope. That’s the easy way out and if you manage to get hope, it will only be fleeting. Hope will easily come to you when you respect all your other emotions. It’s not a quick fix to sadness or anger.
In conclusion, Gabby Cares is all about spreading hope and light to our clients and everyone we meet. We welcome you to join the bandwagon of spreading hope this April. Try and become a bearer of hope and see what happens. Are we challenging you? Yes, we are because we know just how far hope can go to make you a happier and healthier person. We’ve seen hope in action with our clients and how it improves their wellbeing. Don’t ever stop hoping.
“Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there’s no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.”
– Laini Taylor