Practice! Practice! Practice!

Two Cups of Tea at Hope’s Café

“Hope is a muscle,” I read recently.  Elsewhere I heard on a podcast to “practice hope.”  Maybe they are onto something.  This topic is especially relevant at a time when there are so much uncertainty that despair would seem to be a more reasonable response. 

“To hope in a world so fractured, so cynical, so tired—that’s not foolishness. That’s defiance. That’s strength. That’s survival,” wrote Muhammad Tuhin in “Science News” in his article “The Psychology of Hope:  Why It’s More Important Than You Think.”

Tuhin describes hope residing in the brain.  “The feeling of hope activates areas like the prefrontal cortex—the same region responsible for goal-setting, decision-making, and problem-solving. When we feel hopeful, our brains light up with activity that helps us plan, persist, and persevere. In other words, hope is not passive. It is profoundly active.”

“Hope changes the brain—and the brain changes the body,” Tuhin continues. “This is why hopelessness can be so deadly. It’s not just a feeling. It’s a shutdown of the system. A neurological collapse. When hope disappears, so does the signal to keep going.”

If we thought hope was some pie-in-the-sky-wishing-on-a-star kind of thing, the stakes are much higher!  We owe it to ourselves to practice, practice, practice hope.  Think of any skill you have invested in developing.  That effort involved repeated efforts to learn.  If you are inclined toward despair, it is not too late to alter your course.  Your brain, your body will thank you.   

Just a reminder: “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it,” said Helen Keller, who had no small amount of suffering and challenge in her own life.  And this quote was one of 33 quotes put together by a Ukrainian who wrote that she was collecting them on the day that her university where she had spent six years, as had her husband, had just been destroyed.  She wrote: “With everything that’s happening in the world, I feel like hope is sometimes the only thing we can hold on to. This is why I created this collection of inspirational quotes about hope in hard times.”

The invitation is open to share two cups of tea anytime at Hope’s Café or anywhere you share companionship and conversation.

May we be bearers of hope, the “wait staff” at Hope’s Café, for each other and all those we encounter.  Shalom, Kate