Hope Is A Must
If you ask me what the most important thing in life is, I will always say hope. I’m not sure if that would be a common or uncommon answer if you were to ask a group of people at random. I could be wrong, but I think it may be an unpopular choice. I believe that hope is a fundamental part of our will to live and yet the importance of it is often overlooked. When I refer to hope, I mean hope in the general sense. I tried looking up the definition of hope to make this point a bit clearer, but none of the definitions do it justice. The hope I am talking about is the kind of hope that makes you willing to wake up every day even in the face of your toughest challenges. Can you imagine what life would feel like if you woke up one day and didn’t have that kind of hope?
I’m sure some of you can. I know I can. Anyone who has dealt with the depths of depression is acutely aware of what the absence of hope feels like. If asked to describe the feeling, I’d say it’s a numbness so deep it might as well be torture. In my hopeless moments, I felt like there was no point in anything at all. Life felt empty and meaningless. After experiencing that, I know that hope is what makes my life worth living. It’s the driving force behind perseverance which is the only way I’ve made it through some of the darkest moments in my life.
Over the past two years, I’ve been dealing with constant health problems that are still in a relatively unsolved place. I couldn’t tell you how many medications, supplements, diets, doctors, and tests I have tried with little to no improvement. Throughout this process I’ve had my moments of complete loss of all hope in ever feeling better at all, let alone complete relief. Every time I’ve fallen into these holes I’ve had to do whatever it took to find hope again because without it I know I can’t function. I don’t think anybody can.
Hope is a difficult thing to regain once lost, but it’s far from impossible. I think finding hope is going to look different for everyone, but here are the first places I look when I’m in desperate need of hope. I look for, and often find, hope in being grateful for what I do have, in remembering what I’ve overcome in the past and how it felt equally as impossible then but wasn’t, and in my loved ones around me who I know will be there to fill in the gaps and support me when I need it most. What ignites hope for you? Hope is contagious in the best way so please share!