How I Broke Up, and Got Back Together, with Hope

I broke up with the feeling of hope one afternoon in 2004. 

I was driving through downtown Honolulu, Oahu, from Kailua, where I had lived for the past year. I looked up at the marquis on the local Calvary Chapel building and, while it said nothing particularly memorable, I visually remember it marking the moment I decided that I no longer agreed with the impression of hope.

This had been a particularly difficult year for me. I was going through many personal and professional challenges. Everything was askew and made no sense. I would be driving back to Kailua from a bike ride on the North Shore and totally start crying out of nowhere, and I couldn't stop. I would go to the Ala Moana Mall in Honolulu, just to have a "normal" experience, only to head back to Kailua and feel the same level of crappy. I was depressed. I had ended up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with nowhere to hide from everything that wasn't working in my life. 

That moment in front of the marquis, I had the realization that the action of hope was to put energy into the perceived positive effect of someone else's actions on my life. Wait what?! I had to think about that for a while. This act of hope seems kind of self-centered... like through my energy I am trying to control what someone else does for my benefit? Well, that is messed up. What I really realized at this moment is that I had been putting a lot of Hope into the choices and actions of people around me to make my life what I want, and it was not working. So, I gave up on hope and went after faith. 

For the next 10 years, I slowly dove into the practice of finding my faith. This was a whole new way of thinking and being in my life. I had to learn and grow awareness by identifying choices in my life that made me happy. I started small, and I mean really small. I would go to the mall and figure out how to shop that wasn't based off of how many new outfits I would create, and later give away to Goodwill, but off of buying one piece because it made me really happy. I mean, seriously, buying a piece of clothing that would create lasting happiness? Well, yes, in a really simple way. For me, this non-invasive practice of shopping was the beginning of being in tune with the feeling that is the great identifier of my intuition. 

Faith is the outpouring of support I receive from working with the knowledge my intuition provides. For me, hope was an artificial way of finding support through my own life maze. With faith, the goal at the end of the maze does not matter as much because I have confidence in the conclusions my process provides. This lesson transformed my life. 

Yeah, well that is all well and good until I noticed that I started having a real problem with people identifying themselves with hope. Through conversations and random social media comments, I noticed that whenever anyone made a strong statement in support of Hope, I got really internally lit up. I would want to go into these long rants about how Hope was total bullshit, that if you placed too much stock in it then you were forgoing your power over to some invisible guide that would, most-likely, get you to the end of your illusionary rainbow only to find no pot of gold. Yeah, this is seriously how worked up I would get. 

...and that is always the clue that there is a good lesson to be learned. When I am worked up about something, there is an emotion that is trying to teach me a lesson. I knew I needed to give my irritation some attention. 

Only in the last couple of months have I found my peace with Hope. I meditated on it, worked it through my brain in a bunch of scenarios. I finally came to recognize that I didn't need to have any attachment to the conclusion of the hope experience because I didn't need it to do anything in my life any longer. I had my process of faith to take care of me, and hope was now simply an outpouring of positive energy I would add to a situation that was beyond my control. 

My relationship with hope and faith has been a ten-year roller coaster. I have learned to live with both and find they each have their own spot in my heart.