Recently in a deep dark night of the soul moment I found myself wondering “Is hope worth our time?” When we’re feeling stuck, lost and fearful we often hold on to hope for a better day tomorrow or for a certain situation to get better when the time is right. I started wondering how good this really is as a way to deal with things happening in our lives in the moment.
As I often do I turned to one of my favorite spiritual teachers to get some insight. A quote from Thich Nhat Hanh crossed my path.
“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better we can bear a hardship today.
This was something that I felt myself struggling with a bit. In fact I was just finding myself feeling very challenged by the idea of hope in general.
Is there a point where hope doesn’t serve us? Is there a point where using hope to “bear a hardship” does more harm than good?
I think there is.
Let me just start off by saying I’m not talking about little bits of hope that we all have here and there, but what I would call “serial hopefulness”. I’m talking about when we hang on to hope for weeks, months, even years.
When we hold on to hope, especially when we’re holding on to hope around something from the past, we are no longer present in the reality of what’s happening now. We spend time stalled, waiting and hoping for things to line up for us. We’re already in a state of fear and uncertainty that has us slowed down and when we let hope be all we have we kind of just sit and wait.
The other problem with hope is that we see it as being in the hands of someone else. Maybe it’s an ex we want to get back together, a client we want to sign on to work with us or maybe we just let our hope rest in the infinite wisdom of the Divine. Hope usually isn’t something we see ourselves in control of.
While we might think in the moment that hope is empowering us to stay strong and push through to a better day tomorrow, really it can get to a point where it actually becomes disempowering.
Rather than holding on to hope for the future and waiting for things to fall into place we need to have a firm belief in our ability to create opportunities, to create a better day tomorrow for ourselves.
Remember, like attracts like! If all your time is spent hoping for change rather than working to create change in an active and present way, what do you think you’re going to get back from the Universe? More hope. More desire for hope. Not change.
Instead be present with the hardship. Acknowledge it rather than trying to push past it. Feel it. Be sad, be mad, feel grief and be despondent. Then get up, breathe deeply, ground yourself, connect to your Higher Self and ask for guidance to begin creating change.
This doesn’t mean you can’t have hope! But it means you’re not only having hope. You’re taking action. You’re dealing with the reality in the present moment and you’re not waiting for anything external to create change for you. You create your better day yourself. Not God, not the Universe, not someone else. You do it.
So what happened with my struggle with hope and hopelessness?
I had a moment a few days ago where I was ready to give up on many of my dreams. I was ready to just pack it all it, shut it all down and go back to a 9-5 job living a life that wasn’t my own. I thought “Maybe I need to just have hope that things will turn around and get better. I’ll just hope that a shift happens. It has to, right? Things can be like this forever!”
Then I realized, after finding Thay’s quote, that if all I did was hope this hardship, the feelings that were paralyzing me and filling me with fear and anger and sadness, weren’t going to change.
Instead I chose to take action. I had the most clear and direct tarot reading I’ve done for myself in years {breaking out my beloved Gaian Tarot for it because I knew I needed gentle nudges and not a sledgehammer to the forehead}. I realized where I had gone wrong in the moment and I accepted and acknowledge where my dreams were no longer serving me. But I also realized where I was no longer serving my dreams. That’s when it came through like a bolt of lightning that this isn’t about hope but about believe, action and creating conscious change.
So yes, hope can serve you, but there comes a time when it doesn’t. Knowing the difference is what is truly empowering.
