Hope For Your Day

One of my favorite poems is by Langston Hughes called Dreams. One of the lines of that poem is, “Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die Life is like a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”

You may recall the post a wrote some time ago about dreams, if you haven’t or would like to read it again, you can here.

Everyone has dreams. Not just the kind when you close your eyes and go to sleep, but the kind have you longing for something more, something you’re supposed to be doing. And these dreams lead to hope.

Hope – a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.

So often I hear stories concerning young people being told they’ll never amount to anything above where they already are in life. It saddens me that in these stories parents tell their children not to expect to go to college. Never dream to be anything more than what the majority of the population is where they live.

While many of us do what our mothers and father’s did before us, because that is all we know. That is what we are comfortable with, we ignore the gifts and talents that we have been born with in order to do what is expected of us.

Hope is an expectation.

Someday, I hope to see my children graduate college, follow their hearts, and succeed in their dreams. Their dreams. Not mine, not anyone else. Theirs.

Hope is like a wishing well for many of us. It’s lowering ourselves into a place we can’t see and quenching a thirst that feels as if it will never be sated. It’s reaching deep down to where we don’t think we’ll ever touch the one thing we’re after.

But we can. All we need to hold on to our dream. As Langston Hughes poem suggest, without a dream, we can’t fly. We can’t soar, and we can’t accomplish the work we’ve been put here to accomplish. It’s the dream that gives us hope. It’s the dream that leads us to the work that brings us joy.

It’s what helps us press on during those days when nothing goes right when a spark inside us draws us near to something, and motivates us to make it happen.

Almost thirteen years ago, I got a job working at a publishing company. Not as an editor, not as an author, but as the accounting department manager. I wasn’t even thinking about what I could do with all those stories I’d been writing while I was there. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I started writing my first novel.

The burning desire had always been there. Yet, I sat it aside because the expectations others placed on me during my youth didn’t include becoming a writer. Yet, unlike so many, I found my way. I persist and continue to hope and make it happen.

What is it that gives you hope? What is it inside you that you feel you should be doing that your not?

Some may think that time has been wasted. Yet, as I look back I think not.

Sometimes we have to experience situations, have people come into our lives, and gain knowledge before we feel the dampness of the Hope well upon our fingertips. Reaching out is more than a distance, but a time.

Hope cannot read the face of a clock, but grasp it tightly. It is the fuel you need make your dreams happen.

Everyone needs hope. Too often we let go, but when things appear to be the worse and you are disheartened it will help you find your way.

That is why we must always have hope.

And I hope I’ve been able to give you a little of it today.