Standalone Essays · Triad of Stewardship

Hope as a Survival Skill

I don’t want to focus on hope as if I’m looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses. I want to focus on hope because it is a practical survival skill.

Hope, like love, is not primarily a feeling. It’s a choice. And it is one of the bravest choices a person can make.

Purposeful Hope

A chosen hope is not denial. It’s not slapping a smile over real pain or pretending the world isn’t broken when it clearly is. It’s the deliberate decision to approach life with purpose anyway — especially when everything inside you wants to give up. Bitterness often feels justified. It can even feel powerful. But it’s corrosive. It drains energy, isolates the heart, and slowly convinces you that nothing matters at all.

Purposeful hope fights back. It makes no promise of easy answers or quick fixes. What it does promise is simpler and fiercer: you can still act. You can still care. You can still believe in good.

In that stubborn belief, something unexpected grows: resilience. Connection. A renewed sense of purpose.

Creative Hopefulness

Hope is not a passive feeling, but rather an active and imaginative process. In every situation, we can choose to focus on the potential for growth, healing, and positive outcomes. However, this doesn’t always come easily. Sometimes, it takes creative thinking to find the silver lining or to envision a solution to a challenging problem. By cultivating creative hopefulness, we train our minds to seek out new perspectives, look beyond the surface of a situation, and find the hidden opportunities for positive change.

We are often very imaginative when it comes to fear, worry, or anxiety. How many times have we, as children, let our minds see monsters in the shadows; imagined lurid creatures under our beds, or in the closet. We need to be just as imaginative when it comes to solutions, resolutions, paths toward the good, and positive outcomes. By redirecting our creative mindsets, we can transform our fears into constructive thoughts and actions. Instead of imagining monsters in the shadows, we can envision ourselves as the heroes in our own stories, bravely facing challenges and finding innovative ways to overcome them.

The Discipline of the Small

The discipline worth practicing is not passive optimism, but practiced defiance. Real work doesn’t always feel joyful. Real life rarely does. Yet the deepest courage shows up precisely when we act as if joy matters anyway — when we move, speak, create, and love as though light is worth fighting for.

Because it is. Especially when everything inside us screams otherwise.

Bad things happen. And the world is still worth loving — not because the pain is meaningful, but because we are. Even then. Even now. Even here.

See also: Essays · Sojournism: Full Documentation

Part of the Triad of Stewardship’s Standalone Essays. Companion pieces: Forgiveness and Its Limits (forthcoming) · The Mandates of Conflict · Criminal Justice.