How to have hope
Life today is full of anxiety, whether personal or global. The best way to cope – is to hope.
A few years ago I went on a kind of pilgrimage to learn more about my father. He died decades ago, leaving us few details about his past.
I began in Leopoldstadt, the old Jewish quarter of Vienna where my father lived until he was 16, when Nazi brutality forced him to flee. He boarded a train to Zurich alone, trying to look like a Hitler Youth with his blue eyes and Scout uniform. His audacious plan involved navigating mountainous forest into Switzerland and seeking asylum in the nearest town.
I imagined him staring out the window, wondering how his mother was doing. I couldn’t fathom how he clung to hope that his plan would succeed. The fact he did was a miracle.
Today, hope is still in short supply. We worry about war, fuel, inflation and rising interest rates. Many of us lack purpose, barely managing to trudge through each day. The remedies on offer – mindfulness, binge-watching, retail therapy, booze, or simplistic religion – just don’t cut it. How do we find and sustain hope?
Leisa Aitken, clinical psychologist and Fellow of the Centre of Public Christianity in Sydney, has completely reimagined hope for me. It's not a feeling but a task, engaging our mind, heart, and soul, regardless of mood or emotion. It’s an act of defiance in a seemingly meaningless world.
There are four sub-tasks. The first involves choosing to believe our lives are woven into a meaningful story with a past, a present, and a future full of possibility.
In the interim, we tackle the second task – waiting patiently. It’s about facing bad news and despair whilst remaining poised to act when the opportunity arises.
The third task is to surround ourselves with trusted people who help nurture hope, and avoiding interactions with negative people and media bent on dragging us down.
The final task urges us to actively seek glimpses of hope amidst the chaos, choosing to interpret them as signposts pointing toward the future.
This may seem totally unrealistic. But my father, a lifelong atheist, got from Switzerland to join his sisters in Palestine, enlisted in the British Army to fight the Nazis, and after the war aided Jewish refugees to resettle. Later he moved to Canada to start a new chapter. He personified hope as both a calling and a practice, waiting patiently for hard times to end and choosing to see the good in people.
The crucial lesson for me was: his hope for the future was not a distant concept but made him a better man in the present, a transformative force shaping his daily actions.
How can you implement the practices of hope?
