Why I’m Letting Go of Hope...Oh! And My New Word of the Moment
My Word of the Year has already changed.
Yes, I know that it's only March, but I don't like to restrict myself to one word for the whole year. I prefer to have a word for the moment. I talked about this in another blog post and podcast episode so I won't go into too many details about that here.
But in the podcast episode, I shared with you that my word for the moment was "radiate."
Soon after recording that episode, I began to hear a gentle whisper from somewhere deep within me. I am learning to listen to this whisper. It typically has something important to show me or teach me. And as it turns out, it had something to say this time, too.
As I leaned in to that whisper, I heard it saying, "Hope."
I tried to argue with it.
Hope? Really? Isn't it cliché to pick hope as a word of the year or a word for the moment? Hasn't it been misused and overused quite enough? Not to mention that the last few years have brought me nothing but loss and disappointment.
Ok, that's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but sometimes, it has felt that way.
And sometimes, my "hope" feels a bit worn thin…if that is something that can happen to hope. Perhaps it needs a rest. Perhaps I do, too, because I can't bare holding onto hope for another second.
Hope? No, thank you.
But the whisper wouldn't let go.
Speaking of letting go, 2022 was a year of letting go, for me. I went so far as to paste this phrase on my vision board for 2022: "The Year of Letting Go."
My word of the moment was Open Hands, and I knew this meant, in part, learning to let go. And so I spent much of 2022 practicing just that.
I let go of some identities that I had lost my true self in. I let go of some unhealthy beliefs. I let go of the constant need for approval. I let go of my need to control everything. I let go of my timeline because I'm learning that my pace is my pace. I let go of expectations and the pressure to meet or exceed these expectations.
And I held in my hand an opportunity, but I somehow knew that this opportunity wouldn't allow me to live in to my values. I'm learning that doing anything that doesn't align with your core values will only leave you miserable.
And so, I had to let go of The Opportunity.
And I tried to convince myself that it was AN opportunity, not The Opportunity. I told myself to stay open-handed, that letting go was part of the journey, and I needed to trust the journey.
Towards the end of 2022, despite experiencing so much personal growth and despite having so much to celebrate, I felt lost. I felt alone. I felt apathetic. I felt hopeless.
We were having such a difficult time of it, blow after blow, that my husband started half-jokingly saying that he had decided that the only way to survive life sometimes is to not have any wants or desires. That way you're never disappointed.
I hated hearing him say it, but deep inside, I felt it, too.
I was in full-on survival mode which isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes, we need to be in survival mode in order to, well, survive. But I felt like I had been there for too long.
I tried to remain open-handed, as my word for the moment led me to be, but what I felt more than anything was empty-handed.
Where was hope in all of this? I felt betrayed.
And yet that whisper persisted…"Hope. It's time to open yourself up to hope again."
I recently re-watched an episode of Ted Lasso, and in this episode, they say several times, "It's the hope that kills you."
It's the hope that kills you.
That phrase rolled around in my brain. It resonated deeply in that moment and gave me a good chuckle, but then I remembered that hope is also what keeps us alive.
Maybe I've spent too much time reading fantasy novels, but hope is sometimes the only thing that keeps our favorite characters going through their darkest moments.
And I've seen in my all-too-real life what happens when people lose all sense of hope.
And then I thought about this poem that Emily Dickinson wrote about hope. The first stanza says this:
““Hope” is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,”
It never stops singing, but that doesn't mean we hear it all the time.
Remembering this poem made me lean in a little closer to that voice telling me to stay open to hope.
Once again, that whisper taught me something.
It showed me that perhaps living life open-handed is not just about letting go. It's also about remaining open to what may come, remaining open to possibility.
It's about remaining open to hope. Remaining open to it, not just clinging to any shred of it--that wouldn't be open-handed either.
There's another stanza of that Emily Dickinson poem that says about hope:
“I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest Sea;
Yet never in Extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.”
If hope never asks a crumb of me, why am I clinging so tightly to it?
I've often heard people say, "hold on to hope." I understand the sentiment, but sometimes, we don't have the strength to hold on any longer.
Too often, hope feels tangled up. It feels tangled up in pain, loss, grief, regret, should-haves and should-have-beens.
In these moments, hope can become impossible to recognize and more impossible to grasp.
And when the tiniest morsel of hope somehow falls into our laps, we guard it. We grip it tightly with all of our strength.
But what about living life open-handed?
Perhaps it's not the hope that kills us, but the gripping too tightly.
What if instead of keeping that death grip on what we think of as hope, we instead chose to lean in to it. No striving. No grasping or clinging. Just leaning and resting.
What would happen? What COULD happen?
You've probably heard it said that hope is an anchor for the soul.
If hope is an anchor, that means we don't have to cling to it. That's not how anchors work.
If hope is an anchor, hope is the one holding us.
Perhaps it's time to open our hands, even if it leaves us feeling empty-handed. Perhaps that empty-handedness is what will create space for hope and possibility to grow organically.
And in the opening of our hands, in the loosening of our grip on what we think is our only hope, may we find that hope is actually what is holding us, the truest form of hope. The kind of hope that holds on even when we can no longer grasp it ourselves.
Hope, the anchor within us, that holds us even in the letting go.
P.S. I send out a newsletter at the end of the month, that you can sign up for here. In it, we’ll talk a little more about this topic. We’ll discuss 5 Ways to manage expectations while staying open to hope. After all, it’s not usually hope that lets us down; it’s our expectations. Sign up for the newsletter to make sure you get it!
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