Are You Really, Truly Ready to Give Up Your Hope?
Don’t give up your hope. That’s what they want.
Don’t give up your hope. It is neither a weakness nor does it disempower you.
The doom and gloom across the world presently are deeply distressing. There is the utterly ludicrous and crushing invasion of Ukraine by Putin and his army, the seemingly never-ending battle with the COVID pandemic, and the terrifyingly regressive leaked US Supreme Court decision, just to name a few things.
Each on its own is overwhelming doom and gloom. Put them all together, and it’s hard to breathe without feeling like everything is on fire and the world is crashing down around us.
Yes, it’s bad. Nobody can deny that. But if you give up your hope, you let them disempower you.
So what? You are here. Now. Maybe one of these situations is directly impacting you. Perhaps not. But whatever the case might be, you are here. And so long as you live, you have hope.
How does this work?
Hope is a combination of thought, feeling, and intuitive knowing that anything is possible. Specifically, anything good, positive, or able to repair the bad and various negatives we encounter.
When you apply for a job, you hope you will get it. If you ask someone out on a date, you hope they’ll say yes. When a teacher passes a graded test back to you, you hope for a good grade. If you do a good job at work, you hope for recognition, a raise, and the like.
Hope is on every corner, often seemingly insignificant and ever-present. It is an utterly unique blend of thought, feeling, sensation, and generally knowing that defies a simple description.
Unfortunately, three negatives fall into the same indescribable category. Depression, fear, and anxiety. Each is an indefinable blend of thought, feeling, and just being that transmutes between forms and sensations, and frequently defies description.
Hope, however, is a positive, not a negative nor a weakness. Hope is belief in the unseen, in an outcome that might seem improbable or complicated – but is nevertheless present and desirable.
For example – I have hope that this terrible decision the Supreme Court justices have penned will wake up the masses. I hope this will cause the silent majority to end their silence and start being heard, demanding this backward notion be addressed by a new law from Congress.
Naïve? Maybe. But hope is all about belief that bad situations can be turned around.
It’s how we continue to take on the impossible and overcome it.
Your hope empowers you
The all-too-present “they” abhor hope.
Look at movies like Rogue One, Schindler’s List, Avengers: Endgame, and The Shawshank Redemption, for example. All their central plots are predicated on hope. Hope to stop tyranny, to save lives, to bring back the lost, for freedom. And I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t empathize with such hopes.
Putin wants the people of Ukraine to lose hope and roll over for his army. That’s not working thus far at all. The far-right wants pro-choice advocates to lose hope and for women to lose hope of having body autonomy. I don’t think that’s going to go how they’d like it to, either.
I have hope. Hope that Ukraine comes out on top. That we can get new people into office to increase the separation of religion and state. I have hope.
It is empowering. Hope can be inspiring. Your hope is a weapon that can be used by you to let “them” know you won’t just roll over and take the scraps they’re tossing. You are stronger than that.
Because that’s the truth when all is said and done.
You are worthy and deserving of better
Hope has changed the world before. It will change the world again.
Tyranny and oppression never win. Not in the long run. It may take a generation or two – but hope always overwhelms because the disempowered always have access to hope to empower themselves.
You are worthy and deserving of your hope. Hope is not weakness, it’s not folly, and it doesn’t make you lesser. Quite the opposite. Hope empowers.
You deserve to earn a decent living with good pay and benefits. You are worthy of not having to struggle for basic needs or to prove your autonomy. It doesn’t matter what gender you identify as, the color of your skin, your religious practice or lack thereof, or anything else. You are worthy and deserving of having and being the best you that you can be.
Know this – that takes nothing away from anyone else.
Most of the arguments against raising the minimum wage come from lack and scarcity. Why should a fast-food worker make the same as a paramedic? It’s not an either/or matter. In reality, the paramedic should be making more, shouldn’t they?
Don’t even get me started on teachers, nurses, and their pay or treatment.
Likewise, empowering women, LGBTQA+ individuals, and minorities takes nothing away from anyone else. But that’s how “they” frame it – and then use it to discourage your hope.
This is an abundant Universe. All lack and scarcity are artificial. And if something does run out – something new will be found to take its place.
Don’t give up your hope. That’s what they want. Hope is how you are empowered – and that points your focus along the cylinder towards positivity. The good that can come from that is incredibly amazing. And you are completely worthy and deserving of having and achieving that.
Maintaining and keeping your hope isn’t hard
It’s all about working with mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions.
When you have hope, you are empowered. That opens you to work with and direct your life in ways that keep you in control – and prevent “them” from disempowering you. Knowing that hope is neither weakness nor some other disadvantage, it lets us make choices and decisions to keep fighting for our best lives and the good we are all worthy and deserving of. That empowers me – and it can empower you, too. We can make use of this to stay more neutral subconsciously, while consciously choosing things leaning towards the positive end of life’s extremes.
Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast space that exists between them – shifts the concept in a way to open more dialogue. In that form, we can explore and share where we are between those extremes and how that impacts us here and now.
Lastly, I believe the better aware we are of ourselves in the now, the more we can do to choose and decide how our life experiences will be. If that empowers us, it can also open those around us to their own empowerment. And that is, to me, a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share.
Thank you for coming along on this ride with me.
This is the four hundred and thirty-first entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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