Hope

In our current environment hope feels far away.

Depression feels far more approachable and time appropriate. Yet, I chose to write about hope this month because it seems like something we need.

Hope. A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.

Hope seems to come from shifts in our every day stories. When we behave in ways that hurt people, we step back and make commitments to do better. The commitment to shift brings about hope. When we drink too much we take inventory and adjust our coping skills and work towards drinking less, hope. When we gain weight and see some peculiar flab we find a new program that inspires movement, hope.

It’s when we don’t renew our commitments.

We don’t try new coping skills.

We don’t make any shifts.

This place is where hope seems to dwindle.

A place we feel perhaps hopeless and depressed.

Understandably, this past year, we are tired. Feeling hopeless and depressed at times is not only normal it highlights our humanness.

We are not robots. It is truly human to feel different, changed, and even depressed right now.

Thus, I don’t think large shifts and wins are what we are after today. Today, we are after small shifts and small wins.

Instead of a list of to-dos, I am going to share the shifts I made recently that has offered some hope.

For me, I knew social media was not going to be turned off. However, what seemed accessible was to mute accounts that were triggering to me and add several creative accounts around my interests and potential projects. Not a big shift, but I feel it.

I also was frustrated with my daily routine. Quarantine has subtly submerged daily routines with monotony, isolation, and mindless television. Instead of declaring daunting and unsustainable changes I chose to write about it. I wrote out my current schedule on one side of a page and on the other side, wrote out my ideal schedule. To be clear, my ideal schedule is not magically happening because I wrote it down, for sure not. However, it did re-align my mind with my values, creating more mindfulness in my day. It did bring me to the first morning on the porch reading and writing in four months.

Writing about what we want to happen in our life might be the only shift accessible right now. I believe it is one way to anchor hope in us.

I believe we have a small shift in us. Here’s to small shifts of hope for you and me.

Peace.

Photo Credit: Photo by Faris Mohammed on Unsplash