What do you hope for? Friendship? A companion? Money? Children? A home of your own? A pet to replace the one you lost? Success in business? People hope for different things

Have your hopes changed over the years? Remember when you were a child and hoped for something; did you get it/achieve it; do you still hope for it? Were your hopes dashed to the point that you believe there is no hope in hoping anymore?

Hopes change. As we grow solder, we mature in many ways, among them physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually.  Ideally, the hope that we have also matures, becomes broader and more altruistic, which means we hope for ourselves and then for other people.

I first became acquainted with a psychological understanding of hope and subsequently learned of the spiritual, relational, and physical qualities of hope when reading the book, The Psychology of Hope, by Ezra Stotland. Interestingly, this was one of the very first books I read in psychology, which I can yet recommend. A quick perusal of books on hope stand in the thousands. Hope is a topic that seemingly has no saturation. Hope is central to humankind.

In this blog we will discuss the very nature of hope, and various conceptions of what it means to people. We will make a proposal that may sound odd at first: realistic hope. This spiritual hope which should be based on love, which, of course, include the expectation of both joy and sadness.

What is hope

Stotland uses some of Webster’s definition of hope as expectation of something desired and a looking forward with desire and confidence of this expectation. If you’re familiar with our writings, you know that we believe that most phenomena that we study and write about are undefined, i.e., time, God, and even love. Such is the case for the phenomenon of hope. Our approach then, is to look at some of the characteristics of this undefined phenomenon, and then the effects it has on us and the world around us. and the effect it has in the world.

An important note that psychology brings us regarding hope is the opposite of hope: hopelessness. Depression is defined as having one or more of the following ingredients: disruptions of sleep, appetite, and energy together with feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. Theorists suggest that many depressed people choose to be depressed, and hence hopelessness, possibly because they are afraid to hope, desire, and expect good things in their lives. Unfortunately, this kind of negative theorizing does not help us understand what hope is, much less how we can have it in our lives.

The words that Webster and Stotland used to define hope are germane to this discussion, namely expectation, but we would suggest expectation is only a characteristic of hope. We cannot fully equate hope with expectation. An expectation is usually based on a finite requisite. Consequently, thereis a strong chance that you will be disappointed in a specific expectation than you will be in a larger hope. Hope is far larger than something specific. Hope is based on the love we have for something. If we really want to have hope in our lives, we can’t singularly hope for what we want, but rather see that we need to hope in a much larger sense, i.t. hope for the good of all we do, what we think, what we feel as well as hoping for these things with the people in our lives.

Real happiness (or real joy) is important aspect of genuine mature hope. This type of joy is not the thrill of acquisition but the fulfillment of a quality. When we are in a genuine state of hope, we sense of joy because we are hoping that love reigns, both in our lives, in the lives of other people, and in the relationships we have with people.

In short, hope is, by our definition, future love. Instead of trying to define hope, we would choose to put it in the realm of a feeling. Let us examine what we think this feeling of hope is.

Hope and Feelings

While we cannot define feelings, we can discuss the origin of feelings, the usefulness of feelings, and the course of feelings. Perhaps you have read some of our writing about feelings in previous blogs or our books, where we discuss this basic element of human experience together with emotions, which we consider to be a subset of feelings. In quick summary, we conceive of a feeling as grounded in the very foundation of who we are as individual people. This (undefined thing we call) “feeling” erupts physically, emotionally, cognitively, and ultimately verbally or in action. Thus, we suggest that hope touches all four of these basic elements of us in some way, just as all other feelings also affect these four basic elements of human existence.

If we follow the paradigm we proposed in our feeling book, we suggest that hope erupts in us sequentially: first physically, secondly emotional, thirdly cognitively, and fourthly in action. When you hope for something, you will first have a physical experience, perhaps in your stomach, chest, in your head ( most likely behind your eyes or around your mouth) or even your hands (and we aren’t talking about just a crossing of the fingers) but a tangible sensation that suggests something is important. Consider something that you hope for, like, for example, your son winning his soccer game. When you consider your hope that your son might win there is a declarative physical sensation. It is more to you than just an idea. It important to take note of the stirring inside of you when you begin to engage hope.

You will notice that close to the physical feeling came an emotional feeling. We want to focus on this emotional feeling before you allow yourself to go into thinking, i.e. the cognitive expression of the feeling of hope. Staying with the emotional feeling of hope will bring about a clearer understanding of what the hope is about. It is, on the surface about your son winning his soccer game because winning is fun and good. If you stay with the emotion, you can go much further into a sense that the win might engender a greater confidence in your son, a greater sense of community with the team. You begin to realize that the hope includes winning the game but more than that, like you want your son to be all that he can be, which will include his being a good teammate as well as a good competitor. In short, hoping your son wins his game is a way of loving him into his future development.

When you experience the larger emotional part of hope, you might think of something that you say to your sone, or even something you could do on his behalf and the behalf of the team, or both teams. You might find it valuable to encourage your son in his soccer game as well as encourage him to do his best, to enjoy the game, and be a good competitor and a good teammate, all of which is to hope for the best more than just for the win.

Hope and Emotion

As we continue this discussion on hope and feelings, we want to remind you that our conception is that “feelings” are an undefined experience in our souls, maybe simple, maybe profound, but that feelings should not be equated with emotion. Emotion is one of the four expressions of feelings. There are four emotions:

• Fear. This is our most basic emotion. It keeps us alive by identifying potential danger. It is the only emotion we have as newborns
• Joy. This is the first additional emotion we develop in early infancy. It allows us to experience having something, which then becomes love
• Anger. This is a defensive emotion that erupts when we meet a danger. It also erupts when we meet a limit. Most importantly, it helps us develop a sense of self
• Sadness. This is the final and most important emotion we have. Sadness helps us lose something that we have loved

We have suggested in blogs and books (I Want to Tell You How I Feel and The Positive Power of Sadness) that sadness is important in order to love properly because whatever we love, we will eventually lose. The inability or restraint on feeling sad causes anger, avoidance, addition, and anxiety. We have further suggested that all of these emotions have to do with love:

• Fear: that I will lose something that I love in the future
• Joy: the experience of having something that I love in the present
• Anger: the attempt to compensate for something that I loved in the past
• Sadness: facing loss and “finishing” sadness in the present

Note that both joy and sorrow are emotions related to something in the present, while fear is about something in the future and anger is about something in the past. In our last blog we noted how we can reduce anger about the past by recognizing the love of what we have already lost. In this recognition our love for what we lost becomes nostalgic rather than bitter.

Obviously, hope is about the future. We can’t use hope to change the past, that would be fantasy. Nor should we misinterpret hope as wishful thinking, or simply wanting something for pleasure. Hope, we believe, can be used as an extension of love that is both present in the moment but extends into the future. When we hope for good, we are experiencing in the present a form of love in the future. When we associate hope with what we love at a core level, it places hope in a spiritual or altruistic realm. This level of love produces hope for the future rather than fear of the future.

How many times have you simply not dared to hope because you are afraid that you won’t get what you hope for? This kind of “hope” is not genuine hope because it is fear-based rather than being love-based. Hoping that is fear-based leads to anxiety, anger, and avoidance rather than love-based hope that is love-based. Love-based hope is good for you; fear-based hope is not good for you, and it is not good for anyone. As nostalgia is a cure for past anger, we believe hope can be the cure for anxiety.

Some people conceive of hope as getting what they want forever. Unfortunately, when this conception is in place, then fear sets because they actually know that they will not have everything they want and they most certainly won’t have it forever. If you only encourage you son to win the game, he will miss out on the other components in the hope of playing well: to share joy with his team mates, to learn more confidence, to enjoy the possible win as equally as the possible sadness if he loses–both of which come from the love of playing soccer.

Indeed, we need to plan for the future, consider possibilities, including possible problems or losses. But planning for the future isn’t living in the future. Living in the future means experiencing a potential loss and worrying about this potential loss. The most resilient and actually the most dangerous emotion we have is fear because it turns to anger, avoidance, anxiety, and addiction.

Rather than developing the false hope that we will have exactly what you want, or have something forever, we propose that we develop a more holistic, realistic, and valuable hope that will maximize love in the future. We’re not saying that hoping that you son and his team will win the game. We are saying that you can hope for something much better, namely that the very experience of love will be maximized: playing well, playing fairly, playing competitively, playing cooperatively, winning gracefully or losing gracefully, all of which actually sets up the possibility of his having more nostalgia about the game: he can remember the love that he experienced in the whole experience. That nostalgic experience can not only make him a better player and a better person, but can help him face the fact that when I love something, I have joy for a time and always lose that something eventually. The balance of hope, like the balance of nostalgia gives us confidence to love well, to live well, and to experience love to the fullest.

Developing Real Hope

Developing real hope in your life helps you maximize love in your life across time. First, hope is a reflection of what I love in the present which includes both joy and sadness. I love gardening in the sun and so when it rains, I still love gardening even though I don’t get to do it on the rainy day. Or, per our example above, I love soccer when I win and when I lose.

Secondly, I can savor nostalgia. I remember that soccer game I played when I was a little boy and how fun it was to win and how good it was for our team to be sad together when we lost. I remember the flowers I tended at my previous house

Thirdly, by feeling both hope for the future and nostalgia of the past, I might be a better person in the present, which means loving more and loving better. I just might be a better soccer coach or gardener.

It is hard to develop nostalgia about the past in order to avoid anger as well as the result of anger, which is resentment and some kind of punitive action. It is much harder to develop hope in order to avoid the emotion of anxiety that seems to come naturally when we become afraid of losing something. How can you do that? Allow us to propose this paradigm:

• You first imagine something that could be good to have, which means something that would bring joy to your life. You love this thing, whether it is an idea a piece of property, a person, or an experience.
• You allow yourself to revel in  having this thing, which means allowing yourself to actually feel the joy of having this thing. We call this experience anticipatory joy.
• You admit to yourself that you will lose this thing, hopefully after you have loved it for a long time.
• You feel sad. We call this experience anticipatory sadness that comes from anticipatory loss.
• You actually might cry as you think of the certainty of this loss.
• Your sadness fades.
• You retain both the anticipatory joy and anticipatory sadness as you look to the future of having and losing something that you love.
• You feel a deep feeling of love inside of you.
• You dare to venture towards what you hope knowing it includes both having and losing.
• You have developed hope.