Years ago, in a flight while opening up conversation with a co-passenger, his statement expressing hopelessness about the situation in the country, gripped me. While the situation was grim I never thought of it as hopeless and did visualize a silver lining somewhere in the dark clouds.
Today when I have ‘speakers’ on Hallohappiness who do not see any hope in the situation they are in, we play up the silver lining and convince them about it being round the corner and would be very soon visible to them. (Pessimism is actually a temporary phenomenon & hope is the permanent human psyche). What helps in this situation is your surroundings, the few people around us who believe in our hope and endorse it again & again. These relationships are non-judgmental, encourage us in our belief of positivity & hope and nudge us to take those baby steps to achieve our goals.
Sometimes the ‘speakers’, with a hoarse voice, open up about these challenges in life which taught them resilience, pursuance, determination, confidence in their own decision making capacity, faith and above all trust their own instinct. These situations could vary from financial loss, death of a close family or friend, professional challenge, medical emergencies and poor interpersonal relationships. They all believed this to be a temporary phenomenon and trusted themselves enough to ride past the tough times and emerge as winners.
A common factor in all these stories was their ability to see the current event as temporary and were determined to ride it through, engage in what they could control than resign to feeling of hopelessness and give up. Human capacity in dire and insurmountable situations is beyond belief.
Learning to cultivate hope involves our own tendency of over thinking, very often which leads to hopelessness or ‘pessimism’. This closed / narrow view can distort how we see our relationship, our own capabilities our surroundings and even our future.
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope” ,every time I come across this quote from the famous Martin Luther King Jr. I remember all those speakers who came on to Hallohappiness to discuss their situation and believed in coming out winners, and they did.