“Courage is the commitment to begin, without any guarantee of success”
Johan Wolfgang von Goethe
“When the world says, ‘give up’. Hope whispers, ‘try it one more time’.” I don’t know who said this? When I think about times in my life when I’ve been told or I have heard someone say; have hope, be hopeful, there is always hope, it seems to have always been said in one of two contexts. Either at the start of something or at the end of something. In both contexts, hope appears to me as a platitude.
In our world of affirmation and positive thought, I know this is not a very popular thing to say. I am being a little dramatic to get your attention, but stick with me as I clarify.
When I was 16 I decided, I wanted to apply to be an exchange student. I had never travelled outside the continent and wanted to and I wanted to experience a different country. Going as a family was not affordable for us, but maybe if it was just me, it was doable. I did everything. I asked permission from my parents, I filled in the forms. I did research on the countries that were available for exchange. I spoke to past exchange students about what sort of questions I would be asked in the interviews and how I should best present myself.
I did the prep work. I went to the interviews.
The last round of interviews was on a Saturday afternoon and I knew of two other girls from my school who were applying. That Monday, both girls said they crushed it and I hedged my bets and said I didn’t know.
A couple of weeks later the selections came through. The other two girls did not make it and I did. I was over joyed.
One of the girls was in my class wondered how I made it through and she hadn’t. I told her the prep work I had done. She said she did not do any prep work for the last round of interviews because they were straight after a party and because she was confident and hopeful. I ended up going to Argentina and it was fabulous.
That was my first encounter with the insufficiency of hope. I too had been hopeful, but I also had courage to try and the will to do the work. Hope alone is not enough.
Hope alone has broken my heart and my spirit. Hope alone has set me up and watched me fall. Hope alone has proffered empty promises. I hope this treatment works. I hope this is the last chemotherapy. I hope he likes me back. I hope I get the job. I hope I don’t miss the plane. I hope these jeans fit. I hope I don’t get stuck. All these hopes and no hopeful outcome.
I have been stuck a few times. I’ve been stuck on the side of the road, I’ve been stuck in mud and sand. I’ve been stuck in my head. I’ve been stuck in a job. When I was at school I got stuck in my bedroom. No one was home and it was the days before cellphones but I had a phone in my room! I called my BFF and she cycled over and rescued me. More recently, I got stuck in a public toilet – I called my BFF again (thank goodness for cellphones) she got security to kick in the door with me standing on the loo, not my finest hour! And just last week I was stuck in a lift on the 12th floor of a hospital. Thankfully not between floors. The lift stopped at the 12th floor and then nothing. Seven of us in the lift staring at the doors, waiting. Nothing. The doors did not open. After about a minute, a disembodied voice says “Lift out of service”. Followed by a decidedly embodied collective groan. A fellow stuck person says, “I hope someone comes to help us”, followed by a couple of agreements. Nobody did anything, no one pressed the help button, no one even got their phone out to make a call – but there was lots of hope for rescue.
Perhaps I am practiced in the art of getting rescued? I wasn’t near the buttons so I suggested pressing the “help” button so that we could tell someone we were stuck and needed help. 30 minutes later the doors opened – being a hospital, thankfully no one in the lift had an emergency or was claustrophobic.
This for me was another example of the insufficiency of hope. Hoping for something doesn’t make it so, acting is essential to having some sort of outcome to whatever it is that is being hoped for. It doesn’t matter if the outcome is what was hoped for or not. Having had the courage to take some action means at the very least there would have been some kind of change.
You see, despite everything I have said so far, I believe that hope is absolutely necessary. We all have ideals, goals and dreams, these grow from hope. Embedded in hope is endless possibility which is what makes it so powerful. But hope alone won’t make our ideals, goals, dreams and our endless possibility a reality. For all of us to strive for our ideals and realise our goals and dreams we need courage and we need to take action and with each action, comes more courage.
Hope is passive. With hope, I wait. I wait for change to happen to me. Courage is active. With courage, I have the will to take action. I make change happen. Courage brings hope to life.
There is certainty in hope alone. Your goals and dreams stay as they are, full of potential but unchanged and unrealized.
There is no certainty that in being courageous and taking action that dreams will be realized. This is part of what makes courage and action scary and hard. You may not get what you want, you may be disappointed. You may have to change your dream or goal. If this happens, or when the road gets rough and rocky look back and learn from what you have seen and experience; take stock, re-evaluate, readjust, survey your landscape. Then take more action, change course if needed, courage will keep you going forward and keep the journey open with new possibilities that you may never have known with hope alone.
I opened with this quote but I believe a better quote is: “When the world says, ‘give up’. Courage whispers, ‘try it one more time’.”
What do you want to achieve? What goals and dreams do you have? What do you need to do for yourself to be courageous and act? To bring what you hope for yourself to life?