Hope
On staying the course when everything in you wants to stop
On the Path: A letter for those reclaiming their voice, rewriting their story, and walking the path of purpose with presence, creativity, and heart.
Is there any hope?
For us?
For the world?
For humankind?
We have all probably asked these questions.
ON those special days when hope seems a silly idea.
Like a bad dream at the edge of the horizon.
You have been going for too long.
You have been trying so hard.
And yet the world seems to crash on into you like a giant unstoppable pendulum.
And if we let our minds turn dark we can think of human life through history.
Human life without modern medicine.
Human life in the midst of wars, slavery and natural disasters.
How the hell did we ever have hope?
When we start a new business, a project or a relationship, hope is there.
At the doorway with all the beautiful visions of what it will be like, what it might be like, how it will feel like, smell like, taste like.
But anyone who has ever truly tried to walk into a dream, knows well that business building is hardly what social media makes it look like.
Writing book is not the profound quiet process in the inspired room.
And well, relationships are rarely what we thought they would be like.
But hope, is something we need to keep going.
Is it then a feeling, if the feelings of these things, business ideas, projects and relationships fade, change and turn into something that definitively does not feel like hope, then what is this thing called Hope and how can we keep our eyes on it?
The ancient Greeks were honest about this question in a way we rarely are.
Their word for hope was elpis, expectation, anticipation, desire. But they were deeply ambivalent about it. Not celebratory. Not certain it was even a good thing.
In Hesiod’s myth of Pandora, Zeus gives a jar containing all the spirits of the world to the first woman on earth. She opens it and everything escapes. Disease, suffering, grief, chaos. Everything that troubles a human life, released at once.
But one thing stays behind.
Elpis. Hope.
She does not escape with the others. She remains, caught at the lip of the jar, sealed inside.
And here the Greeks could not agree on what this meant.
Is hope trapped inside us as a consolation, the one thing that stays with humanity when everything else has fled?
Or is hope just one more affliction, the last and most insidious one, because it makes us embrace our own misfortune?
The question was never resolved.
And perhaps that is the point.
To the Greeks, Elpis was not worshipped through rituals but through survival. Every time a farmer sowed seeds after a drought, every time a mother prayed for a child’s return, every time a poet wrote despite despair, that was an offering to Elpis.
She did not demand temples.
She already lived within the act of enduring.
When we start a new business, a project, a relationship, hope is there.
At the doorway with all the beautiful visions of what it will be like, what it might be like, how it will feel, smell, taste.
But anyone who has truly tried to walk into a dream knows that business building is hardly what social media makes it look like.
Writing a book is not the profound, quiet process in the inspired room.
And relationships are rarely what we thought they would be.
The feeling at the doorway fades. It changes. It turns into something that definitively does not feel like hope.
So what is this thing called hope?
And how do we keep our eyes on it when the feeling is gone?
In the 1990s, an American psychologist named C.R. Snyder did something quietly radical.
He took hope out of the realm of feeling and put it into the realm of thinking.
Hope, he argued, is not an emotion. It is a cognitive process with three distinct parts.
First: a goal. Something you actually want to move toward, specific enough to steer by.
Second: pathways thinking. The ability to generate routes toward that goal. Not one route, multiple routes. The willingness to find more than one way when the first way fails.
Third: agency thinking. The belief that you can actually use those pathways. The internal voice that says: I can do this. I will find a way.
What Snyder found is that hope, defined this way, predicted outcomes more reliably than intelligence, optimism, or previous success. Academic performance. Athletic results. Recovery from illness. Business ownership satisfaction.
The distinction that matters most is this:
Optimism says things will probably be fine.
Hope says: I will find a way to make them fine, and if the first way doesn’t work, I will find another.
One is a feeling.
The other is a skill.
This changes everything about what we are actually looking for on the hard days.
We are not looking for the feeling to come back.
We are not looking for reassurance, or certainty, or evidence that we are winning.
We are looking for the next route.
And the belief, however small, however quiet, that we can take it.
The Greeks kept that in the jar.
Not released into the world to dissipate.
Held inside.
In us.
This is a series piece next week I will ask: If hope is a skill, how do we maintain it when the target is lost? A piece on Maltz, Alexander, and the long arc of change.
Hope and hope again,
K
If this landed somewhere real, if you are at the doorway and the feeling has already started to fade, this is the work I do with people in 1:1 sessions. Not a rescue. A real accompaniment while you find the next way through.
Book a session here. Or start with a free 15-minute conversation here.
And if someone you know is asking these questions right now, please send it to them.