August 24

Hope Matters!

Enjoy this selection from our Goddess Living Community.


We have noticed that hope has taken a beating lately... You hear comments about giving up and that hope doesn’t matter. You see posts on social media about hope not really getting us anywhere, particularly us women.

Times are tough right now on multiple fronts, for many reasons. Women's rights being rolled backwards, high prices for regular stuff like food and gas, terrible and persistent climate disasters, the list goes on and on. Many of us have been expressing deep grief and cynicism about hope.


Losing hope?

Hope isn’t easy to come by and for sure, it doesn’t feel up to the task of the issues we face.

Many of us are experiencing the heartbreak of watching so much happening in the world that is hurtful and people are suffering. This heartbreak often provokes feelings of hopelessness, resignation and ultimately apathy, which can really seem like a relief from it all.

But as we wrote in a recent article, apathy never turns out well for us. While providing some temporary relief, it almost always shows up in unhealthy ways down the road. You can read the article HERE.

What we are trying to say when we say hope doesn’t matter is that we have “hoped” in the past and it didn’t turn out. This experience happens a lot for people, however it is not because we “hoped” it is because we were not related to all aspects of what we had hoped for.


Living a Fantasy?

As humans, we have a tendency to think that how WE think is how it IS. We can’t imagine people would not see things the way we see them. We know, theoretically, that there are people out there who don’t think as we do yet we can’t imagine they wouldn’t or couldn’t at least see the same facts or impacts we see. This is definitely fantasy.

The dictionary definition of fantasy:

Noun: the faculty or activity of imagining things, especially things that are impossible or improbable:
• a fanciful mental image, typically one on which a person dwells at length or repeatedly and which reflects their conscious or unconscious wishes


Sounds about right! It is the fantasy of thinking others see what we see, know what we know and think what we think that gets us into trouble. What we can do is remind ourselves (often) that what we think, see and believe is not universal. It is valid and true for us and maybe many, many others as well, but not everyone.


This brings us back to hope.

Hope is vital to the human experience. Hope is what keeps us going when times are tough. Hope and Vision combined are potent motivators.

Hope can evolve into intention, intention creates an opening to take action and action creates change.

The dictionary definition of hope:

Noun: a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen:
• a person or thing that may help or save someone
• grounds for believing that something good may happen


When we lose hope, and worse yet become mired in cynicism, resignation and apathy, we literally have joined the opposing view’s team of whatever issue we have lost hope about. No REALLY!

When we say things like “too bad it won’t make a difference” or “the right people won’t see XYZ” we are missing the point. We don’t need others, WE need to be inspired and hopeful ourselves.


Nurture Hope. Curb Fantasy.

We can curb our fantasies by keeping ourselves engaged and informed with the issues that matter to us and remembering that others may, and often do think differently.

We nurture hope by looking for it. Looking for evidence of progress and looking for places we can experience and talk about what we are hopeful for.


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"Learning never exhausts the mind." 

~ Leonardo da Vinci

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