Hope is a magical thing. It allows for inspiration and aspiration. For setting goals and chasing dreams. It honors potential and gives value to the future. It’s important to have hope. It’s necessary. At times it may be the only thing you have. Sometimes it’ll be all you can have.
Despite current doom-saying trends, having hope is not difficult. In fact, it’s easy. To have hope you need two things.
- You have to identify what you want.
- You have to believe it’s possible.
That’s it. Know what you want and believe it can happen. Do those two things, and you have hope. Put that way, it doesn’t seem very magical at all. But, believe me, it is.
Our hopes counterbalance our fears. Things we want from the future are our hopes. Things we don’t want to happen are our fears. These—our hopes and fears—form our beliefs about right and wrong. The golden rule “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is a condensed way of saying “Treat others how you hope they will treat you. And don’t mistreat people in any way you fear being mistreated”
What we think of as wrong, are the things we fear happening to us. Don’t do something to someone else you wouldn’t want done to you.
Our idea of what’s right, comes from our hopes. Do unto others as you hope they would do unto you.
I’m going to repeat that. Your hopes become your model for the right way to treat other people.
Abandoning hope, is like throwing away your moral compass. If you hope to be treated kindly yourself, you’ll treat others kindly. If you don’t, you won’t. See how that works? A world of people without hope, is a world of people who can see no reason for kindness. And without a hope that things can be better, there will never be an attempt to improve.
A life without hope is bleak and tragic. If you were to look back at your life, I’m certain all the high points, will have, at least, one thing in common. They were the times when your hopes were highest. When your belief in the future was at it’s greatest. When you really believed something good could happen. When you believed life could be better.
It can. Have hope.