The Feeling of Hope
I just had a couple of bites of raisins in my mouth when I realized the bag was swarming with little crawling things. Ewwww! I still feel like I want to throw up several hours later after eating them. Are those bugs in my stomach right now? What were those bugs? How did they get into my raisins? An unopened bag as of the moment I took a few out this morning. I imagine one raisin was infected before they were packaged and sent to the grocery store because how else they found their way into plastic beats me. I feel like they are crawling in and around my stomach. So gross! They feel connected to the annoying and endless amounts of house projects that I have been dealing with. Is there a lesson here?
Our toilet has been broken since it was installed. Even Home Depot is having issues dealing with their installers. What’s the lesson here? Is there one? Maybe everything is a reminder that control is an illusion and that things happen outside of our control. An unworking toilet, bugs in our raisins, these are both things no one would wish for. Or hope for.
Hope is an interesting word I am curious to explore more. What do I mean by hope? Hope is something used when we long for something out of our control. It is wishful thinking for something that may or may not actualize. I am not sure there is any value to hoping for things. For instance, I can hope that Home Depot would fix the toilet this week but it doesn’t really help to just hope for it. What’s hope without action? In my opinion, it’s meaningless. Because if I had not followed up with Home Depot no progress would have been made. The manager kept emailing their suppliers without any response. Now we will use our own plumber and they will pay for it, this week. Not in one, two or three. Maybe hope without action lacks speed or results and I like speed and results in situations like this one especially. What do I mean by speed and results? I mean movement when I say speed. Movement towards a desired state. I mean a resolution and end to the follow-ups when I say results. I guess it’s possible hope still results in movement and resolution but with a much longer timeline. People often say they hope for this or that and are hopeful for this or that. Am I the odd one out here not seeing value in being in a hopeful state? Is the opposite of hope pessimism? No, I think just being realistic with what needs to happen and the next steps. It’s not that something could not be possible just that realistic steps have to happen for them to occur.
My hand really hurts as I continue to put pen to paper, and I have to stop to massage it. Which ends up being a distraction to my writing process. But at least I am not hoping it feels better without taking action to make my thumb hurt less.
What does hope feel like to you?
