Hope
Hope is an attitude, a mindset that allows a grounded and optimistic outlook, even in the most challenging circumstances. Thus it is within times of adversity when we learn how to hope, not in times of ease. It is within these challenges that we believe we have the power to change our lives. Our hope is not a fixed entity but has degrees and can be activated and cultivated.
Lucy Hone has both professional training and personal experience with heartache, as her family lost a daughter in a car accident. In her textbook, Resilient Grief: How to Find Your Way through Devastating Loss, she outlines a great exercise and I will share it here.
Given what you are up against, what are you hoping for now?
What’s important at this time?
If you decide to do _____________, is this decision taking you closer to your true goals?
What can you do to help you get there?
When a family or couple is living with long term decline, having hope requires periodic re-evaluation and discovery of more realistic goals to hope for. Wise hope is often an outcome that is less than one initially desired. The better able a person or family can live and become comfortable with uncertainty, mystery and doubt the easier it will be to connect to hope. As Gilda Radner writes in her autobiography, It’s Always Something:
“ I’ve learned the hard way that some poems don’t rhyme and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. This book is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”
When we explore our values and the ways to show their meaning, then we find the path to our hope. Hope is not a feeling but an orientation to live in the present reality with positive and optimistic actions and attitudes. And when there is constant ambiguity in our days, then tolerating and holding the paradox of “both/and” is the key to hope.
Yours in living and loss,
Brenda
References:
Boss, Pauline PhD. (2006). Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss. New York: WW Norton and Company.
Boss, Pauline PhD. (2011). Loving Someone Who Has Dementia: How to find Hope While Coping with Stress and Grief,San Francisco,CA., Jossey-Bass.
Hone, Lucy PhD. (2011). Resilient Grieving: How to find Your Way Through a Devastating Loss. New York: The Experimenting Publishing Co.