Hope is like the sun, which, as we journey towards it, casts a shadow of our burden behind us. It lends promise to the future and purpose to the past.  It turns discouragement to determination. ~ Samuel Smiles

Have you ever known someone who seemed to give up hope?   They just seemed to go through the motions of living their daily lives.  They functioned most of the time and maybe others who knew them didn’t even notice that the spark they once had was missing.

I often work with people who are close to giving up any hope for a different and better future.  I don’t necessarily mean they are experiencing a true clinical depression.  It’s simply that they can no longer  easily find any real meaning for their lives. It seems to be hiding.  They can’t dig that hope and meaning out from under all the stuff that has accumulated and gotten in the way.

Sometimes they are suffering from grief for a variety of reasons, and and are waiting for time to take care of this. They have bought into the “time heals all” myth that many people still cling to and want to believe. They haven’t yet learned any of the tools that can help them tame their grief and that can give them the meaning and purpose to improve and energize their lives. They haven’t figured out how to make meaning of a loss they may have experienced, or other difficult things they have lived through.

My clients have been (and still are)  folks who’ve lost spouses or other loved ones through death, or people whose dreams seem to have died and they don’t even understand why. Some have had children die, or lost them through adoptive placement.  Some adoption clients I worked with in the past  had nearly lost their dream of having children. I have worked with adopted adults  too, who mourned the loss of their birth culture and families of origin.  Some had almost given up all hope of finding them, the connections they felt they needed,  or of finding a way to feel better about themselves in spite of such a loss.

Then there are those who have simply lost themselves somewhere along the way. They’ve let their talents and ambitions get buried under a load of fear. That fear may be the result of their earlier lives, of habits and beliefs that no longer serve them, but they need help changing.  Still others allow their own dreams to be drowned by the expectations of family, friends and co-workers. They find themselves working in careers, or doing other things that give them little or no satisfaction. They forget  how to hope for anything more.

Widowhood especially, can bring out fears and cause hope to fade, even in women who were previously very competent and confident. There are so many changes in every aspect of life.

Some people just give up, and as mentioned, spend their years going through the motions, living a cardboard kind of existence that robs them of the ability to even find possibilities for change.

Yet we have all known individuals who still have a spark that refuses to be extinguished, no matter what they’ve lived through. They just know something is missing and feel a longing or tugging from within that tells them they need something to be different.  They need change. They know they haven’t been able to make changes on their own and hope may be hard for them to grab hold of and keep going.  They haven’t let go of hope altogether, though.

People ask me why I like working with those who have experienced terrible loss, or who are going through big and difficult life transitions. It’s because I know that no matter how bleak life looks and feels, there are always some tools and strategies we can find, or can build up to help ourselves.  It’s because I’ve been to dark places myself.  I know that finding a way to hang on tightly to even a shred of hope, is crucial. It brings me joy and great satisfaction to see people begin to blossom, when they thought their time of blossoming was over.

We may need somebody impartial to  help us recognize that there is hope on the other side of the curtain.   It just isn’t easy to see, or to feel when darkness or even the boredom of mundane routines, has enveloped us and caused us to stay stuck in dissatisfaction.   I also know there is work involved, and that we have to truly believe we deserve to seek and find hope and happiness.

When we’re stuck fast to habits that keep us unhappy in our lives, we want so badly to believe that even in the depths of fierce and terrible grief, or other miseries,  there can and will be better times. Many of us don’t really believe such assurances initially.  We don’t understand at first,  that grief is an ongoing process and a talented shape shifter.  We don’t really get that seeking and finding new hope is actually a choice we make, a goal to reach, that usually happens in increments, when we allow it to happen.

If you are someone who has accepted a life with little or no hope, and are simply surviving from day to day,  mostly in misery, are you ready to acknowledge that? This is your first step!  If you are ready to embrace even a small amount of hope and to work at whatever it is you want to happen, then you have to decide what’s really holding you back. Do you know?

When you reach a place where you’re unwilling to live as you are now living, you will know it’s time to seek something new.  Sometimes grave dissatisfaction, and the pain of loss, become an incredible opportunity for growth. If you change your perspective a little and practice seeing the world that way, it will help you.  I say “practice” because if you have spent a long time being negative, feeling sorry for yourself, or accepting that it’s your fate to be in pain and unhappy,  then you need to work on practicing a new way of living.

Try making a commitment to write down some things every day that are positive about yourself, and about your life.  Then think about what you might need to let go of, in order to rebuild your arsenal of hope. That’s a start.

The future is calling out to you. Your soul is calling out to you, but you must be willing and ready to hear them both.

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.” 
–Joseph Campbell

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Iris Arenson-Fuller, PCC,  a trained and credentialed coach, (by the International Coach Federation)  is a Life Reinvention, Grief and Loss, Women’s Confidence Coach.  These days she mostly works with midlife women, Baby Boomers, widowed women. However, if you are not in those demographics and  what she says resonates with you, give her a call or shoot her an email.  We can set up a conversation to see if we’re a good match for working together.

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  if you would like to discuss working together. Let’s talk about it!

Check out Iris’s  Poetry: Blooming Beyond Brooklyn: Poems of Roots, Sorrows & Lessons

https://www.amazon.com/Blooming-Beyond-Brooklyn-Sorrows-Lessons/dp/0692036148/

Here’s a summary on Amazon: “Customers find the poetry in the book finely crafted and powerful. They describe the author as impressive and creative. Readers also find the emotional content evocative and transformative. They say the book explores grief and pain and comforts and brings them to tears.”