Hope is the thing

Hope by Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
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I hope we don’t destroy the planet before my great-grandchildren get a chance to fix it.
I hope Obama can get us straightened out.
I hope my dog is getting walked.
I hope this mucositis goes away soon.

What is hope? Pondering this, I’ve come to some conclusions. Hope is more than optimism; it includes a reasonable expectation for a good outcome. Hope is what we have when we can only influence an outcome in a limited way, or not at all. Hope can and will change form given new information. If circumstances grow more dire, we hope for more specific outcomes – maybe we were hoping to be out of the hospital in a week, but now a setback has us just hoping that the new chemo is effective against our cancer. If all else fails, we hope for a miracle, probably a false hope.

Leading up to the recent presidential election, many of us hoped that Obama would win. Now that he has won, we expand our hope to include everything wrong in the USA, and then everything wrong in the world. He seems like a global figure, and I have always hoped that someday we would recognize that earth is the gift from God to us, and this is what we should worship, and we need someone to lead us to this conclusion. Hope springs eternal. “Yet, never in extremity, it asked a crumb of me.”

I feel very hopeful in a much broader sense than I did a month ago, hopeful for myself and for everyone else.