Hope is free! Practice it!

Nowadays, it seems increasingly difficult to leave the house without the gnawing feeling that you will go broke, lose your job or open a newspaper to find the world has gone berserk! Everything seems to be working against our willingness to see beyond the fog created by the global economic crisis, and the brutality exerted on those less favored.

The last thing to be lost

Getting out of bed does take some courage but hope is what really makes it easier to get up and face the world anew. We can always hold on to hope. Hope can makes us strong. We can hope that the good will prevail, that the best is yet to come, that we can still have faith in people. The belief that hope is the last thing to be lost holds true. Once you lose hope, you wither and die. At best you may fall into a deep depression hard to get out of without the antidote: hope.

Reasons to live through hope

Hope comes into play when we are in dire straits. Going into survival mode the brain seems to look for a reason to keep going and will hang on to the slightest bit of hope, a reason to live.  One of my favorite books brings this to light, and I tend to read it at least once a year to remind me that there is hope even in the most challenging of situations: the book is Man’s search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, who tells of the time he was an inmate in a concentration camp, and how every day there was a thread of hope or reason to live, at least for another day.

How to practice hope:

• Believe in the good of people, no matter how often they might have wronged you or others.
• Believe there is something to be learnt every day.
• Believe every moment is unique and precious, and that ever day you can start a new chapter.
• List all you are grateful for.
• List all the people you appreciate being in your life.
• Help someone and go out of your way to do it.
• Start a new project you feel passionate about.
• Plan activities for future dates, time shared with friends.
• Pray if you may, to life, to the wind… Whoever or whatever you believe in.
• Ask for hope even when you have none left in you.
• Forgive, this will ensure the hope of a peaceful mind tomorrow.
• Don’t look back on past mistakes, these will only hold you back.
• Forgive yourself and practice self-compassion. You will become better tomorrow.

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

Dale Carnegie

Laura Carbonell is a bilingual and bicultural language teacher at Casa Hispana in San Francisco. She is a foodie, enjoys cooking and sharing her abuelita’s recipes, and wearing makeup and sharing her findings. But most of all she is interested in life and people. You may follow her on Twitter

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