Rung Three thoughts: Hope stings infernal

Reader’s note: Reminder that Rung Three is “There is one God who made all things.” Here, I ramble on hope.

I talked about religion with my therapist yesterday.

She said hope is crucial. You need to hope. Maybe you hope to be better. Maybe you hope things will get better. Maybe you hope things will be different in the afterlife with your immortal soul. As Franklin shared in his epitaph he wrote in his youth that he didn’t use when he died in his 80s (see above):

His actual tombstone epitaph just said he and his dead wife’s name. (Sadly, he spent 15 of the 17 years before her death away from her in other countries.)

Where does hope come from? Hope comes from our values and our beliefs about this world, all of it, and any others we know to be real or imagine could be: “Hope is an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes with respect to events and circumstances in one's life or the world at large.”1

What would that look like? I suppose there are as many answers as there are to the question, “What do you believe about God?”

You don’t need to believe, as Franklin did, in God, his immortal soul and an afterlife. But you do need to believe in something.

I sometimes struggle with hope. I am not as driven or ambitious as some, but more driven and ambitious than others. But usually my yearning is looser than typical, time-based goals: I want to have fun. I am curious. I want to be open and vulnerable. Those don’t really have endgames. Those don’t have steps, although they can. They are like wishes for myself and how I unfold in this world.

Because this week’s Franklin table virtue is “Silence,” I’ll leave it at that.