Hope, Optimism, and Tulip Bulbs

This morning we experienced our second snowfall of the season in Santa Fe.  While the fluffy white flakes are beautiful and I look forward to wintertime, I can't help but feel cheated out of the final weeks of fall.  I planted my bulbs a few days ago, and I guess I was just in time before the first freeze!  I'm hopeful that my gardening efforts will come to fruition and that I'll have a garden full of tulips and daffodils come springtime.  

Today also marks three months until our due date with Baby Girl!  With every milestone we grow more confident and excited to meet her.  There's nothing like waiting for the arrival of a baby that makes one contemplate the importance of hope.  Working in acute care, I encounter hope (and lack thereof) in my work everyday, and I have had many discussions with colleagues on what hope means to a patient's survival and outcomes.  In today's political and social climate, hope can seem like a lost cause, and yet history demonstrates time and time again the power of hope to effect change and motivate action.  Hope keeps us engaged and allows people to believe that something better is possible.  Rebecca Solnit discusses this idea extensively in her book Hope in the Dark.  

I presented an inservice a few months ago to the hospital's Ethics Committee that I chair on the topic of Hope, Optimism, and Miracle Thought.  My underlying message was the potential dangers of "miracle thought" when it comes to healthcare outcomes and ethics consultations, especially when thinking about medically ineffective healthcare and balancing the ethical principles of beneficence and non-maleficence (doing good while avoiding doing harm), but we also spent a lot of time talking about the difference between hope and optimism.  Hope is the feeling that something wanted will happen, and it motivates us to develop strategies to work toward our goals in the midst of obstacles.  Hope requires engagement and action.  Optimism, on the other hand, is the belief that everything will turn out positively, irrespective of reality.  

The danger of optimism is that we do not play an active role in the outcome, and when things don’t turn out positively, we can become cynical, apathetic, and distressed.  We might start to feel as though nothing makes sense and everything is out of our control.  In this way, optimism can create suffering.  Roshi Joan Halifax at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe talks about "wise hope," which requires that we open ourselves to what we do not know, because hope us rooted in the unknown and the uncertain.  Wise hope doesn’t mean denying the realities that we are confronted with today.  It means facing them, addressing them, and addressing suffering right now.

I also love the language that one of my favorite contemporary authors, Barbara Kingsolver, uses when discussing this topic: "Hope is a mode of survival.  I think hope is a mode of resistance.  Hope is how parents get through the most difficult parts of their kids’ teenage years.  Hope is how a cancer patient endures painful treatments.  Hope is how people on a picket line keep showing up.  If you look at hope that way, it’s not a state of mind but something we actually do with our hearts and our hands to navigate ourselves through the difficult passages."

Barack Obama in his "stubborn hope" speech stated, "I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting."

So my tulip bulbs are in the ground, I have three more months of my pregnancy with our baby girl, election time is upon us, and a new season awaits.  There's a lot to be hopeful about, and a bright future exists if we are engaged in the process.

My little helper in the garden

Watering our newly-plated bulbs

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