Hope Floats

“Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” – Shawshank Redemption


I think of myself as a pretty hopeful person; I’m always hoping for the best in others, hoping for a positive outcome and hoping to hear good news. I hope for success, hope my work is appreciated and I really hope I don’t trip down the stairs in my 4-inch heels.

Hope can truly be the cornerstone of life; when all else is lost and crumbling around us, all we have left sometimes is our ability to hope. But, when we let ourselves rely solely upon hope, are we doing ourselves a disservice?

A few years ago, I started seeing to a therapist. It felt weird at first; I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t suicidal, I didn’t have some horrendous disorder or experience I was trying to work through: I was just a regular person with real person problems. I needed a way to talk about my issues (however small they might be) and work through my own head. There tends to be a stigmata attached to therapy; people like to think that something major must be wrong for you to reach out to a trained professional for help. Actually it’s just incredibly cathartic to talk about your problems to someone other than yourself.

I’m no longer attending therapy, but the experience taught me many valuable lessons along the way. I think I just needed someone to tell it to me straight, which is exactly what she did: after a year, she told me I didn’t need therapy. Huh? Turns out I just needed to get out of my own head.

Worrying about every minute detail of your life is always a recipe for disaster, she would constantly explain to me. I worried about everything, and then worried about how much I was worrying. That way, I made sure I never had the chance to stop worrying. It was beginning to take a toll, until she asked me to do something every day that scared me: make myself uncomfortable. I was so stuck in my ways, rigidly concerning myself with making everyone happy, that I was making myself unhappy. It was frightening and exciting, all at the same time.

Of all the things I learned in that experience, just one stands out above the rest: the concept of hope. I used to talk about how hopeful I was, how often I wished for things and really hoped everything would be perfect. I’ll never forget the look on the therapist’s face when she processed what I said, stopped scribbling on her yellow legal pad and responded:

“At what point do you stop hoping for everything and start doing something?”

It made me laugh; it was so obvious, but the thought had never crossed my mind that my hope was actually holding me back. Critically ill people don’t hope they start feeling better—they go to the doctor and get treatment to (hopefully!) save their life. Hope is a wonderful, fabulous thing. But, when you allow it to replace the actual work required to make your dreams come true, you might as well walk through life wearing a blindfold. It’s sort of like making a mixed drink: you combine two ingredients in the perfect combination to make something that tastes good and is an enjoyable experience. Hope and work are the vodka and cranberry of life: you must always hope—always—but never let it stand in the way of doing the work to get what you hope for. It’s all about balance.

I remember hearing a beautiful story on TV once of a man who was in a concentration camp during World War II. I don’t remember when or where I heard it, but it’s always stuck with me. He began to describe the horrible conditions, the nauseating sights and smells he remembered from the awful experience in the camps. His children, his wife, all of his possessions were stripped away to never be seen again. Each day, he watched people around him die and he recalled feeling hopeless. With anger and tears in his eyes, he looked up during the interview and, with finger pointed, said:

“They took everything from me. There was nothing left of my life. They could have those things, they could have it all. But, they couldn’t touch my mind. I still had my hope, my thoughts and my dreams. They would never have those things.”

It’s so beautiful to think that we will always have something to hope for, no matter what is thrown in our path. But, it’s our feeling of hope that propels us to take action to chase our dreams, wherever they may lead us. We don’t just hope—we DO. The moment we refuse to allow our hopes to become anything more than a simple feeling is the first moment we accept our failure