hopeful heart, a desert-dwelling care bear for many 💛🌈

Hope is about safety, and safety is cultivated through connection – and love.

It's been interesting to hear everyone's reactions to the seismic events of Tuesday night. Mostly joyful, but some notably restrained, reluctant in their optimism. I'm always curious when people hedge or qualify their sense of hope. I know my curiosity is not unbiased. I am an optimist. A reasonable one, but an immutable one. And I know why. My parents are optimists. My father, unbridled in his enthusiasm. My mother, a little more fearful, but when push comes to shove, emphatically, lovingly hopeful.

Like all things, I think where a person falls on the pessimism to optimism (or skeptical to hopeful) spectrum has to do with childhood narratives, upbringing, models – the protective factors in place during a person's formative years. I see this in my students all the time – either the presence of baseline optimism, or a deficit. It's hard for people who lack economic and familial safety, who have been repeatedly let down by people and systems to feel hopeful, happy, optimistic. It's too dangerous. If you wander into the unfamiliar open terrain of hope, away from the only community you know that has perhaps been toughened by repeated disappointment, you don't know what might happen to you out there. A Care Bear might pop out and bludgeon you to death vis-à-vis big new feelings. So a bit of jaggedness, reluctance, resistance to optimism becomes the protective factor.

The only method of restoration that I've seen work to remedy this inequity of hope is cultivating deep connection. I'm sure anyone who has been in love will notice how much easier it is to feel optimistic when those other amazing feelings are effervescing like champagne in your life. Love is an extreme example, although love can exist in many forms in a person's life. So how does connection happen? It starts with reaching out to someone who needs it, then showing up consistently, and staying. This is love. It builds trust. Here's the tricky part. The trust then has to be reciprocated, and that requires some undue amount of courage, a leap of faith on the part of the skeptic. It requires venturing out into that unfamiliar terrain of hope, trusting that the mysterious desert-dwelling Care Bear will indeed come, and in peace, and then visiting with him again and again to strengthen the safety-trust-love-hope-optimism circuit. And then, hand in hand, every good, terrifying, embarrassing higher order feeling becomes possible.