Yesterday I watched several documentaries about September 11.
Twenty-five years later, the images are still difficult to watch.
But something stayed with me after I turned off the television.
Hope.
I kept thinking about the families waiting to hear about someone they loved.
A husband.
A wife.
A son.
A daughter.
A parent.
A friend.
They didn’t know.
And in that terrible space between knowing and not knowing, many of them held on to hope.
Maybe they’re alive.
Maybe they got out.
Maybe they’re injured somewhere.
Maybe the phone will ring.
We know now that for many families, the news they desperately hoped for never came.
And yet, watching them, I found myself thinking about what hope was giving them during those unbearable hours.
It couldn’t change what had already happened.
It couldn’t guarantee an outcome.
But for a little while, hope gave their hearts somewhere to go besides despair.
What Is Hope?
I’ve been thinking about hope as an energy.
What actually happens inside us when we move from:
There is no way.
to:
Maybe.
That little word can contain enormous power.
Maybe.
Maybe this will work out.
Maybe help is coming.
Maybe tomorrow will be different.
Maybe I can get through this.
Maybe I will laugh again.
Maybe there is something ahead of me that I cannot see from where I’m standing now.
Nothing outside us has necessarily changed.
We still don’t know the outcome.
The problem may still be there.
The person may still be missing.
The diagnosis hasn’t changed.
The money hasn’t arrived.
The relationship hasn’t been repaired.
And yet something inside us shifts.
A tiny opening appears.
That’s hope.
A Doorway Out of Despair
I’ve written before about David Hawkins’s Map of Consciousness and how meaningful that framework has been in my own life.
It describes different emotional states ranging from shame, guilt, grief, fear and anger upward toward courage, acceptance, love, joy and peace.
Hope isn’t one of the levels Hawkins named on his map.
But I think of hope as something that can help us move.
When I’m frightened, despairing, or convinced that nothing can change, hope opens a tiny door.
I don’t have to leap immediately from despair to joy.
That would be an enormous—and sometimes impossible—distance.
I only need enough light to see that perhaps where I am standing right now is not the only place that exists.
Hope whispers:
There might be somewhere else.
And sometimes that’s enough.
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
We use that expression so often:
There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
Maybe hope is what allows us to believe the light is there before we can actually see it.
We’re still in the tunnel.
It’s still dark.
We still don’t know how long it is.
We don’t know what we’ll find when we emerge.
But somewhere in the distance, we can imagine light.
And because we can imagine it, we take another step.
Then another.
Then another.
Hope gives us enough energy to put one foot in front of the other.
Sometimes that’s all we need from it.
Hope Doesn’t Require Denial
Hope isn’t pretending everything is fine when it isn’t.
It doesn’t mean denying pain.
It doesn’t mean refusing to grieve.
It doesn’t mean forcing ourselves to find something positive in something devastating.
Sometimes life hurts terribly.
Sometimes the outcome really is the one we desperately hoped wouldn’t happen.
And when that happens, we need time.
We need to grieve.
We need to cry.
We need to be angry.
We need to feel whatever is ours to feel.
Hope doesn’t ask us to skip any of that.
Perhaps it simply sits quietly beside us while we do it.
And when we’re ready, it whispers again:
Maybe someday this won’t hurt quite this much.
That’s hope, too.
Stepping Outside the Scene
Sometimes when I’m going through something difficult, it helps me to step back mentally and become the observer for a moment.
Instead of being only the person standing inside the painful scene, I imagine myself looking at the larger landscape of my life.
I remind myself:
This is happening now.
But now is not forever.
There have been other moments in my life when I couldn’t imagine how something would resolve.
And yet time moved.
Life changed.
I changed.
The view changed.
Sometimes what once devastated me eventually taught me something.
Sometimes something beautiful grew beside the pain.
Sometimes I eventually reached peace.
That doesn’t tell me how today’s story will end.
But it reminds me that I haven’t reached the end of the story yet.
And that gives me hope.
Find the Little Corner
Sometimes we don’t have much hope.
Maybe all we have is a tiny corner of it somewhere in our hearts.
That’s enough.
Don’t demand that it become confidence.
Don’t force yourself to believe everything will turn out exactly the way you want.
Hope doesn’t need certainty.
In fact, hope exists precisely because we don’t know.
Just protect that little corner.
Maybe.
Maybe tomorrow.
Maybe somehow.
Maybe there is help I haven’t discovered yet.
Maybe there is strength in me I haven’t needed before.
Maybe someday I will remember this moment without feeling the pain I feel today.
Maybe I will feel peace again.
Maybe I will love life again.
Maybe there is still something beautiful ahead.
Keep Going
That’s what I saw yesterday as I watched those families waiting.
Human beings holding on during an unimaginable day.
Hoping.
Praying.
Waiting.
Loving.
For many, the answer that eventually came brought tremendous grief.
But hope had carried them through the hours when there was no answer at all.
And perhaps that is one of hope’s greatest gifts.
It doesn’t promise us the ending we want.
It gives us something to hold while we make our way toward whatever comes next.
So if you’re going through something difficult today and you cannot find joy…
Don’t force joy.
If you cannot find peace…
Don’t force peace.
If you cannot even imagine that everything will be okay…
Don’t force that either.
Just see if somewhere inside you, there is room for one tiny word.
Maybe.
Maybe there is light ahead that you cannot see yet.
And if there is…
Take one more step toward it.
Then another.
Then another.
Sometimes hope doesn’t need to carry us all the way home.
It only needs to help us take the next step. ❤️