Hold On Possibilities Exist

I've just finished reading my friend Leanne Coppen's blog about living with breast cancer (I've written about her before) and her tagline at the bottom of today's post is "hope".

Oh, goody, Hope is one of my favourite topics.

I have a Buddhist friend who likes to say, "No hope, no fear, I am free."

But I like having hope. The above statement, for me, speaks more to the a state of hoping for something, which, indeed, can feel like the opposite of freedom.

I believe Hope is less a state of being than a belief system in and of itself.

Hope is necessary for our survival. Hope gives us a reason to keep on going.

Hope is not about wanting something to happen but about believing in the possibility of anything and everything.

People survive cancer. There is Hope.

Addicts do recover. There is Hope.

Gay rights exist where they didn't before. Hope.

The human race continues to evolve. We're figuring it out as we go along. We get it wrong often but history has shown we eventually get it right. There is hope for the future.

In my angry teenage years I was almost afraid to hope. "We're born, we live, we die, who cares?"

Without hope, I reasoned, I am safe.

This reasoning was born of fear. I was afraid to have hope. If I had hope and something bad happened, then what? Better to have no hope at all.

Can we still believe in Hope when "bad" things happen? We must.

It takes great courage to believe in something as powerful as Hope when things go "wrong". Hope requires Trust.

When things do not go according to how we think they ought, we must remember that the end of the story has not yet been told. Things are working themselves out. H.O.P.E

Hold On Possibilities Exist.

Inspiring Message of the Day: We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Bigger Picture

Would you believe I woke up 30 seconds before the cat pounced on me in anticipation of the rude awakening?

Sometimes we know things before they happen.

How does that work?

Last night I went into the local Correctional Facility to talk to a group of female inmates about what life could be like for them if they stopped drinking.

There were eight women there and they were all (perhaps save one -- though she looked it) First Nations.

I was reminded of Steve Earle's song "Billy Austin" in which Billy describes the men in his prison as "mostly black, and brown and poor."

All of these women were brown and poverty was something they had no doubt all experienced. All of them were there because of crimes committed under the influence of alcohol.

We were talking about the "spiritual experience" of noticing the world around us, seeing the bigger picture, connecting to a higher sense of being through nature; tuning in to the colour of the sky, the texture of the grass, the birds flying above.

By the end of our session there was hope in the room.

Inspiring Message for the Day: When we take the time to think about how a tree can grow from a tiny seed, how the earth spins around the sun, how we can know things before they happen, we are connecting to the Life Force Energy of the Universe, and we can overcome hopelessness.