How do you define hope?

Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent. 

~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

I love that quote. It tells a truth of hope in a nice, neat, little package and it’s wholly appropriate for a blog dedicated to mental illness. Of course, like any sound-bite, it’s not a complete description.

Personally, I think hope is a kind of coping mechanism. Facing fears and sorrows is easier when I have this thing we call hope. It doesn’t make the hurt or difficulty go away, but it allows me to look forward to a future in which I have successfully passed beyond my current challenges. Will I actually make it? Who knows? Hope does not guarantee that I’ll get what I want or where I want but it lets me believe that it is possible.

He that lives upon hope will die fasting. 

~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death. 

~Pearl S. Buck

Those quotes seemed so pessimistic at first but they go together quite optimistically. They tell me that action and hope are companions. Hoping for bread without doing anything to get it? Or a house or a job or a significant other or .... ad nauseam. Hope alone won't do the trick. Doing something without a sense of purpose or meaning? That's not going to work out well either. Without both, hope and action, my world and my life will surely seem pointless and valueless. I will wither and die.

As far as action is concerned, sometimes it comes from within and I act on my own behalf. Those days are easy. I am competent and confident. My life is my own and I have control of my fate.

When I am weak, though, hope doesn't move me to act. It can't. It gives me just enough energy to breathe from one terrible moment to the next and to believe that maybe the next moment will be better. In those desperate days, I hope I can I put my hope in someone else, someone who will be strong in my place until I have grounded myself in my own power again.

If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so. 

~Eric Bentley

I find it reassuring to know that I can safely trust people around me to be hopeful when the world I experience is black. It's humbling to know that sometimes I must be the one to hold hope, like a torch, high above my head and yell into the dark, "It's not lost!"