“Hope — a faculty decidedly different from and far more muscular than optimism.”

~ Maria Popova

Perhaps I am only beginning to understand hope. Last year, I wrote an article on the peace of hopelessness. This reflection came from studying a moment in my life when the specific outcome I had been hoping for in a certain situation vanished. In that moment, living the circumstances that I feared the most, I became hopeless and curiously enough, I relaxed.

After the article on hopelessness was published, a cyber-friend wrote me an email saying that maybe I had missed something. Then he sent me a story he wrote about hope, which he metaphorically likened to the tiny spring in a cuckoo clock he had been piecing together during a difficult time in his life. I have remembered this and have continued to wonder about hope. Because I knew even as I published the article that I was not ready to give up hope entirely. Hope is utterly necessary.