Excerpt From: “A Sermon on Hope” by Quinn Norton, American journalist and essayist.
People often mistake hope for a feeling, but it’s not. It’s a mental discipline, an attentional practice that you can learn.
Hope isn’t just looking at the positive things in this world, or expecting the best. That’s a fragile kind of cheerfulness, something that breaks under the weight of a normal human life. To practice hope is to face hard truths, harder truths than you can face without the practice of hope. You can’t navigate dark places without a light, and hope is that light for humanity’s dark places. Our practice of hope cannot be so fragile that understanding the truth can wreck it.
This hope, above all, gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem hopeless as ours do, here and now.
The discipline of hope …. begins in kindness, …it comes from looking for places to serve something larger than yourself…. It comes from cultivating gratitude. Hope teaches you to put the world before yourself, but in doing so, hope teaches you an unfragile happiness in loving the world.