Finding Hope 2

Now you know all about hope and how to get it. Automatically solves all your problems, doesn't it? No? That's because having hope isn't a status, it's a process and a battle. Life is wired to bring you down, and trust me, the lows will be more than the highs. Whether it's bad luck, or the devil (if you believe in religion), there'll always be something that's out there to attack your little baby hope and send you back to the pit of despair you came from.

I know my tone might not be the best to motivate someone, but sometimes the cold, hard facts do you a lot more benefit than sweetened words that tell you life's a bed of roses. In this part of my 'Finding Hope' series, we will be dealing with keeping your hope alive, or how to deal with a failing hope.

One of the reasons why we lose hope is the way we handle that hope in the first place

When you find something that you're dreaming towards, and you consciously make efforts towards that thing, you generate hope. Hope that with that thing, your life could become a lot more bearable.

If whatever you place your hope in has a foundation of human help, you're putting yourself in the Frontline dear. That is to say, if your hopes are based on the reasoning that a person has to help you in a major way on the path to achieving that dream, you're in for a hell of a ride.

That human being is just like you, flawed and unreliable. If he or she fails to deliver, it could spell the end of that hope, and you're back to the pit you came from, only that it's worse. Once you have developed hope in something and that thing fails to work out, something happens in most people.

Your brain develops a pessimistic mechanism.

That's right, and although the occurrence ranges from not happening at all to severely destructive, this can be a major problem. Through this mechanism, next time you want to try and hope or believe in something, your brain brings back the memory of this epic fail, giving you reasons not to even try, and that chokes your dream.

It takes a huge amount of willpower and faith to be able to come out of the pit of despair and try to pick up the pieces.

So what can you put your hope in?

As a Christian, I've learned to put my hope in God. Believing in someone who cannot fail is good, and so far I've not been disappointed. But many people are in the loop as far as this is concerned. Why?

What if I don't believe in God, or anything in particular?

Here lies a major problem for many people. People who don't share your belief in a God or Supreme being that can't fail them are often left out of that equation, and you can't pin that on them.

The best thing for you to do is to find a way through the problem, because there's no way around it.

In absence or a religious tendency, one thing works, and it's called the Driving Force.

In my next part of the series, I'll explain exactly what the driving force is, and how you can use it to regenerate a dying or lost hope.