Hope Is In How We Decide To Live Life
by Maureen McKane, LCSW
Hope is a Labrador retriever. Despair is a slithering mollusk. With hope you take on life as it presents itself. With despair you hide behind a false face and life wanders by unnoticed.
Hope is Amanda's lemonade stand next door last June. A folding chair, a plywood platform, a pitcher and a sign. Amanda watched the street all afternoon, her brown eyes wide. It is a quiet street with little traffic. The pitcher never emptied. But she had a few customers and a reservoir of determination.
Despair is Harvey, who told me he is overweight and sick, because of the weight. He'll readily tell you about his bad eating habits and the self-denigrating thoughts that trigger them. His stories have one motivation: to prove how he can't change, because he never has before.
Most of us don't even realize when we get locked into despair. It looks like reality. Your job is impossible, or your marriage feels doomed. Then despair's negative thoughts feed you into a whirling eddy of more despairing thoughts until you become immobilized. It is action that is needed and for that you need hope.
Hope is activity. Despair is lethargy. Taking action makes the blood flow and with it the belief that there is a chance to succeed. Avoiding action leads us to bottle up all that energy while reasoning out why we could only fail if we tried.
The key that turns one person toward hope and the other toward despair is a sociologist's term: locus of control. A person who looks at a problem and sees that his or her owns efforts might make a difference, is locating life's control inside the self. When another believes that only an act of God or a change in another person will make life okay, he or she is locating the center of control outside the self.
George says he never despairs, he copes. George lives in a painful, hopeless marriage. His way of coping is to bury himself in work and to ignore his wife's criticisms as much as possible, taking a vow not to speak with her about the relationship because that would only make things worse. This is not coping, it is silent desperation. He waits. For what? He doesn't know.
Those who study the psychology of human satisfaction say that we feel gratified when we are doing, not when we are idle. A problem presents itself and we are challenged. Rising to the challenge, even when we don't know for sure that we will succeed, this is when we feel engaged with life. Then getting involved with that challenge, we concentrate deeply and time passes unnoticed. It is a profoundly satisfying state of mind. If our efforts pay off, hope and well being are reinforced. If we do not meet with success, we are challenged anew to find another strategy and engage again.
Prisoner's of war fall into these same two categories. Those who believe they are helpless give up. They grow sick and die before the war ends. Others believe that prison life is life. They spend their days inventing ways to communicate with each other, inventing games or learning what another has to teach. Their minds are pickaxes mining for nuggets of satisfaction in the granite of imprisonment.
Hope begets hope, despair more despair. Pick one or the other. You have a choice. It would be easiest to blame God, your boss, your children or your spouse. But that is a dangerous and a passive luxury. It puts the solution into the hands of another and robs you. To blame is to plunge into the despair vortex. God and your spouse are doing what makes the most sense to them. You must do the same. Take your own action. Turn the key and engage. That is how it feels to hope.
