There’s Still Hope
Gratitude makes optimism sustainable.
The sign that says this quote hangs suspended between two black plastic arms. The letters are made out of bendable plastic that allows each one to slide into the white plastic grooves on the display. It’s not fancy. The opposite of high tech, in fact. For that matter, I’m not even sure who owns the sign. It sits outside of a house that I think might double as a business. I’ve never really paid attention. But I always notice the sign. Each week it displays a new quote. They’re always inspirational; sometimes quirky, sometimes cliché. But occasionally there’s one that hits me square in the heart.
Like this one.
Gratitude makes optimism sustainable.
Full disclosure: I’ve been a bit of a “Negative Nancy” lately. Not to throw around excuses and all that, but I do come from a long and sturdy line of pessimists, so it’s not exactly surprising considering my pedigree. But in recent years, I’ve tried to make a change. Why? Well, look around you. Crappy things happen to optimistic people and pessimistic people alike. And the optimistic people just seem to be having more fun while the you-know-what hits the fan. I get one life, and I’d rather enjoy it than bemoan it.
Of course, Mary Oliver says it best in “The Summer Day”:
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
My plan is to get optimistic about things. To live on hope rather than despair. But it’s not always easy to do. Which reminds me of this profound quote from Dallas Willard:
“Disciplines are activities within our power that enable us to accomplish what we cannot do by direct effort.”
And that, I believe, is exactly what this week’s encouragement on the sign was saying: by practicing gratitude I can begin to create an optimistic mindset.
Optimism isn’t a switch I can flip. Maybe other people can, but not me. It would be inauthentic and flimsy at best. But gratitude I can do. I might be a natural-born pessimist, but good golly, I can be grateful for a warm shower each morning and sunshine pouring through my front door window after a handful of cloudy days and cutting open a perfect avocado for my breakfast sandwich. Even when the world feels impossibly sad and the future looks bleak, practicing gratitude helps me to focus on what is going right and giving hope in the world today. And the more of that I can recognize around me, the more optimistic I feel about this whole blessed thing called “life.”
On my way to take my Littles to school yesterday, I pulled up to the entrance, ready to hang a swift right into the parking lot, but the car in front of me didn’t budge. “Come on, buddy,” I moaned under my breath. Morning drop-off can sometimes have the intensity of transporting live organs when you have a 7-year-old in the backseat counting down the minutes till the cafeteria closes for breakfast and he’s out his customary cereal bar before class begins. Keep in mind, he’s already had a full breakfast at home. But the school breakfast, well, it comes with unlimited amounts of sugar and no Mom looking over his shoulder.
So, the countdown had already begun when the car in front of me came to a halt. But just before I slammed my hand down on the horn to move him along (“probably looking at his phone” the pessimist in me murmured), I saw the swaying tails of a few ducklings passing in front of the man’s car. I looked up to see that all the cars in the intersection, which usually fly by each other on the busy road, had stopped as well. Soon, a mother duck waddled out past the front car’s bumper and into the middle of the road, her babies faithfully following behind. And there we all sat. I looked into the cars around me and on every single face I saw a smile. In the middle of our breakfast-closing countdowns and running late to work and to-do lists, we recognized the goodness before us. For a full minute we sat and watched the mother duck bring her babies safely to the other side of the road. Against all odds, she made it.
And we’ll make it, too, friends. Because there are still good people in the world who are willing to put life on hold to watch the miracle of nature walk across their paths. There’s still the Divine looking out for us and caring that we get to where we need to go. There’s still a sun above us and breath in our lungs.
There’s still hope.