To hope or not – that is the question

Sometimes life can get to you in little ways. It can be very creative about how it does it. For example, raining on the day you’ve washed your hair, your favourite dish on the menu is sold out, receiving a phone call from a distressed friend, waking up from a sweet dream, getting stuck in traffic, receiving a curt email, or negative feedback from your near ones, reading a book with a shitty end, not receiving the email you were hoping for, finding no milk in the fridge for your tea, or adding more things to your to-do list. Separately, these are negligible but accumulate a series of bad news and experiences across a day, a week or month and you are begging for that camel’s back to break. Essentially, you start to lose the threads that keep your days together, and give you stability.

I am a resilient person. Or so I’d like to think. Resilience could be defined as the time it takes for you to recover from something negative in your life. My average time across 30 years is a week +/- 2 days. It means if something awful happens in my life, I can bounce back anywhere between 5 days to 9 days. That means wiping it clean from my list of daily worries or musings. I usually use my resilience reservoir for the big stuff, with a capital B. Major drawbacks. Life changing events.

However, this year, my life has been getting to me. It’s not allowing me to be resilient for the ‘B’ig things. It’s sucking me dry on the menial day to day happenings. Draining me so much that getting out of bed has become a chore. My garden is beyond recognition. My desk a messy place. An empty fridge.

So I gave it some serious thought (x plenty). Then concluded I needed something to boost up my resilience reserve. I thought if I can’t come up with an answer soon, I won’t enjoy any of the good stuff. I’ll find an awful thing about everything in my life, including conversations, people, activities, and so on. In short, I’ll be inviting life to get to me in every possible way.

So I started thinking about hope. After all, the topic of hope has been explored extensively by many. Here are two quotes from one of my favourite movies, Shawshank Redemption:

• “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies”
• “Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane”

Exactly my sentiments – to hope or not to hope. I decided I’ll do both: hope but not only hope. I’ll counter the awful things by engaging in something positive. I’ll build up my success reservoir and in time get my resilience back. This post is one of those positive.