How Do We Find Hope?

I was talking to a friend today and a thought came to my mind. That being, sometimes I’m up and sometimes I’m down a bit. And nothing has changed except my thoughts.

When I am up, I’m thinking good thoughts about almost everything I can think of. For example, how grateful I am for a place to live and sleep comfortably and how I have the blessing of being able to make my payments to keep those things working for me. Or perhaps how grateful I am to have my family and that our health and safety is not being compromised, and so on.

When I am down, I may be thinking about how bad things are and how they could be better and yet my life hasn’t changed, nor anything around me in my environment, only my thinking has, nothing more.

So how do we find hope when we are in these kinds of hopeless thinking situations? We do it through first realizing what our thinking is. And that it is what it is and nothing more. Then we can protect ourselves from our own thinking by thinking oppositely of that which we are thinking. Because when you think about it, there is an equivalent amount of good in comparison to that which is bad and vice versa. So if we can shift our thinking in finding the good that exists, then we accomplish finding hope in a sometimes thought to be hopeless moments. It’s up to us to make the shift.

Other times and may I say on extremely rare occasions we are unable to find the equivalent good that lies before us as we dwell on our hopelessness. I think it may be that we aren’t trying hard enough to find the positive and good elements that are there. For example when a family or good friend passes or when justice or fairness isn’t adhered to. But if we search hard enough we will find the good that exists from every experience. Even if it’s our ability to handle more challenges easier than the last because we grow stronger through each one.

Yet hopelessness can be used for good by recognizing it and then taking actions to do what you feel is right. To make a stand by confronting in a loving manner the people that make you feel this way and by doing so becoming a hero and a leader to others because you have the courage to stand up for what you believe in. Or maybe you can use your hopelessness energies for the good as you do some act of helping others by perhaps volunteering your time in some way and dedicating this act of kindness to the situation or person with whom your hopelessness has been manifested from. You see, when you do this wonderful deed, you are working in a positive way and the hopelessness will fade away into a feeling of goodness. The actions that you take will result in good having been done all because the experience of hopelessness that you encountered.

May these thoughts be a source of strength as you look for peace and happiness in your life when times get tough and your attempt at trying to understand situations appears to fail you. Please provide your thoughts on this topic; we’d love to hear from you on them.