Coping with hope…

I sure hope the coronavirus goes away. I sure hope that we can make the changes needed. I sure hope my kids will do what I say. Over and over we are always hoping for an outcome that is not guaranteed, but we strongly desire it to become the reality.

Hope is that desire for something to happen, but we need to take a step back. We can’t always trust hope. We can do a better job of avoiding the things that make it necessary for us to hope in the first place.

First off, there are always going to be things out of your control. So when you are blindsided, or put into a predicament that is out of your control, then do your best to analyze the situation, use your knowledge, and then hope (you have someone in your life that can give you some help.)

Getting back to hope on things you can somewhat control a little more. First off you need to find ways to mitigate or prevent as much as possible the thing that will provide the undesirable outcome in the first place. You will need to identify what things you can’t control. Assess the risk, and move on (aka hope). The things you can control, you need to try to minimize the risk or remove it. You can mitigate a lot of risks by building redundancy into your system.

In some cases, you can eliminate the risk altogether, completely removing the need to hope, because the issue is no longer one that will be of consternation in the future.

Hope is a beautiful emotion, that gives us surges of energy, can have quasi-healing properties, and can reduce illnesses, stress, anxiety, etc. If it was a pill you would want to always take it. And in a way, it is like a placebo. It isn’t really there, but you can call upon it and use it you can begin to feel the effects.

We need to continue to hope, but we can also cope with know there are things to mitigate that don’t nearly need as much hope, to begin with.