When People Lose Hope… and How to Help Them Find It Again
Hope begins deep in the heart and soul and mind and then flutters like a butterfly out the window and into the outside world. There, it can either motivate and inspire or fall on deaf ears.
When people lose hope there will be unrest, at home and in the streets. So how can you make sure you always have hope in your heart and mind, for all occasions and in all instances?
During 1733–34 English poet Alexander Pope, considered to be the foremost poet of the early eighteenth century penned a poem entitled “Essay on Man.” You may be familiar with this excerpt:
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
I was a child of the 1960s, being raised by a mother who was a free spirit. She was creative instead of logical, and funny instead of serious. There were many times as I was growing up when I wished she was more like every other mother I knew. And then there were the occasions when I appreciated her for her most outstanding quality; injecting regulars doses of hope into my life and in the lives of those around us and serving it up by the spoonful as needed.
We were poor, and I was aware of our circumstances from a very early age. This came primarily through my own comparison of the material things we lacked, like a car and a telephone. That’s when the storytelling began. I said that my mother didn’t drive because of all the crazy people on the road, and that we didn’t have a phone at home because we didn’t want people calling at all hours of the day and into our evening hours when we were watching our favorite shows. I omitted the part where we walked or took the bus everywhere we went and that I would sit on the sidewalk down the street to do my homework so I could hear the pay phone ring if one of my school friends called me.
My mother spoke of people who were as poor as a church mouse, needy, or destitute, but I would never have imagined she was including us in those labels. And though I knew on an intellectual level we didn’t have two nickels to rub together and were poverty-stricken, deep in my soul I always…
