While Hoping for a Cure

Below are some of the hopes that participants at a "Diabetic Peer Support Hope Retreat" named after participating in hope activities. I wanted to share them with you because on the first night together the theme centered around hopes for a cure. By the third day together, the participants' hopes had shifted and that elevated my hope. When I saw them at a follow-up session, three weeks later, the first thing I heard one participant say to another was, "Do you want to walk with me three times a week at the mall?" Another participant shared what he has been collecting in his hope bag since we last met. 

- I hope I will be more knowledgeable for tomorrow.

- I hope we'll understand each other better.

- I hope I can keep my eyesight.

- I hope we can help the Youth Diabetic Prevention Project.

- I hope I can control my cholesterol and blood pressure in choosing foods more closely in my diet.

- I hope I can understand more about diabetes and hope that someday there will be a cure.

- I hope I will live better.

- I hope I am becoming a healthy person to help others.

- I hope I can control my blood sugar level by exercising and sticking to healthy foods.

- I hope I will feel better about myself.

- I hope I exercise three times this week.

- I hope I will see some changes in the near future.

- I hope I can learn more about diabetes and practice caution.

Hope Notes

I found this quote while reading about the importance of stories as a way to find meaning in our lives ~ 

"Hope is born while facing the unknown and discovering that one is not alone."

Need I say more?

(Austin MacCurtain, in a review of John Updike's Self-Consciousness that appeared in The [London] Times Literary Supplement,as quoted by Martin Marty in Context 21:15 (15 August 1989), p. 3.

Hopeful Perspectives & Generalized Hope

Well I have waited long enough.

I was hoping that by not responding to the query two blogs ago, that others might put forth their ideas. Since that has not happened YET, I will tell you that, "Yes, I believe hope is a perspective that helps us see or find opportunities." Having said that, I also believe that at times it is difficult to maintain a hopeful perspective, which is why we need to surround ourselves with 'hope coaches'. It is also why I believe we need to find ways to uncover and access our hoping selves and the hoping selves of others. It is why I was so determined to publish a resource that contained ways to access our hoping selves.

I think Dufault and Martocchio (1985) would agree. They did a study with 35 elderly cancer patients and found there are two spheres and six dimensions of hope. I believe the spheres contribute to what I mean when I say when we look through a hopeful lens our thinking, actions, feelings, and relationships helps us envision and move toward a future in which we can participate with enthusiasm and interest.

The two spheres of hope are particularized and generalized. Particular hopes focus on specifics, often in the moment. Particular hopes might be: I hope I don't freeze on the way into work today; I hope I can write another section for my paper before I have to leave my desk this morning; I hope no one bullies me today. Generalized hope, on the other hand, provides an overall sense of hope that things will turn out okay, a sense of well-being and security that one will cope with whatever comes along. It is a feeling or sense that one can develop and work toward particular hopes.

On the flip side, if we have experienced many hope suckers in our past or do not feel very hopeful, our generalized hope would look, feel and sound quite different. Let's use the particular example of the particular hope "I hope I am not bullied today." This might be the statement of someone who is using a 'less than' hopeful perspective or whose generalized feeling of his or her ability to be or not be bullied is not very hopeful. Feeling that one has strategies to cope with the bullies of the world helps me feel that when I meet one that things will turn out okay because I will be able to stand up to the bully or at least have supports in place so that I am not harmed by the bully's actions or that I can access the support I need it so that I do not continue to be harmed.

So now what do you think?

As you might know, I am curious about how hope influences our actions, thoughts, feelings and relationships. I am also curious about what others think, feel and believe about hope and hoping. So I quickly posted the comment from my last posting in the hopes that it would engage others. I also had to think about the query as I celebrated 'Family Day Weekend' with my family at the lake. However, as I feared, I am not technologically competent enough to know how to moderate comments on my blog. With that in mind, I decided I would do what I can do at the moment. I will respond in a new posting.

I can tell you that I often hear adults say that 'things look, feel, and sound different' after they spend time making hope visible and accessible in the various hope-focused workshops that I have participated in. Teachers tell me that their relationships with their students shift the day after they have completed an activity from Nurturing Hopeful Soulsresource. I plan to ask teachers how their relationships look, feel and sound different after they begin making hope visible and accessible in their interactions with students. In the meantime, I look forward to hearing what others think, feel and believe. I also look forward to learning how to moderate my blog.

Intentionally Paying Attention

Children and youth repeatedly tell me that they turn to hopeful people when they feel the hope suckers settling in. The hope suckers that visited me this morning were voices from my past reminding me how I struggle with writing. Instead of letting my 'fearful self' take over my thinking, feeling, acting and thus my ability to connect with myself through writing, I intentionally turned to Wendy's blog at www.thehopelady.blogspot.com.

As I read Wendy's latest post, my ears let go of my shoulders, my lungs expanded, I picked up my pen and started to write what I needed to know.

Our mission at the Hope Foundation is to study how intentionally using hope enhances quality of life. I believe that seeking out or thinking about what a hopeful person would do is an intentional act that distinguishes hope from wishing. Hope researchers, Farran, Herth,and Popovich (1995) state that wishing is the precursor to hope. I agree. Wishing might be construed as an intentional act that enables one to envision and work toward a future that one can participate. In other words, I needed to do more than wish that the words would flow through my fingers. There are those of you who might say that I could have picked up my pen and started writing. However, past experience has taught me that that does not work for me so I did what does work. Paying attention to thoughts, feelings, actions, and relationships that enhance our hoping selves is one of five hope practices that are outlined in our most recent resource, Nurturing Hopeful Souls: Practices and Activities for Working with Children and Youth available at www.ualberta.ca/hope.

Hopeful Places

I have the good fortune to be working alongside grade seven and nine students in the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program. Today we wrote about 'hopeful places' in the grade nine classroom. This is not as easy as it sounds. I was proud of how the students worked hard to generate a list of words to describe how hope feels when we are in these places. There were a couple of students who had difficulty thinking of a 'hopeful place' - past or present in their school or community. I wonder if they will remember a place when their classmates share stories of their experiences in these places next week.

In the grade seven classroom we created collages of 'hopeful places' in groups. And then using the collages, filled in a T chart to describe what hope looks, sounds, and feels like. We also brainstormed 'hopeful places' and how the places are hopeful in the community surrounding the school. As I said, we worked in groups in the grade seven class and so we were able to talk about the skills we were developing as 'team' members. We discussed how group skills will help us when we go out into the community to bring hope to others. As we encounter the challenges that go with an inquiry project it will help to know how to contribute to the team.

I leave you with a poem that one of the grade nine students gave me to share with you about what she is learning about hope.

Hope is...

Laughter, tears, and strength.
It's the weakness facing it's opponent to prove
the power and will be become stronger.
It's clarity developed from the frustrations
and confusions of our lives.
It's that feeling of accomplishment, of victory
after experiencing the 'battle of anger, sorrow and loss'.
It's the comfort and love of our family and friends, ~
the trust, loyalty, honesty, bravery, faith.
It's the never ending story of the world's diversity, completely
different and unique and one.

Lessons From Grade Five Students

Today I met a group of grade five students who were introduced to the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program for the first time. Since we are in phase one of the program we talked about what researchers do. The teacher and I do this to frame our work together at the beginning of the program as a quest to awaken new understandings. We had not yet talked about our hope study. I finished reading The Three Questions by Jon J. Muth as I often do when starting this work with a new group. When I asked if anyone had a comment, wonder or a-ha they would like to share after hearing the story of The Three Questions, a hand shot up in the air. "How can you study hope when it is unique to each person?" I want to say that I handled the question well, but the truth is that I did not. The question, as I acknowledged, was an excellent question. What I did not say was that it was one of the questions that drives much of our work at the Hope Foundation of Alberta. We know that there is more than one way to search for the many wonders that we have about the multi-dimensional nature of hope. My own research interests are to use narrative inquiry or the telling of stories to uncover and discover how hope guides our actions, thoughts, feelings and relationships in the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program. I did not say all this because I was too astounded to respond with any clarity. I think I said something like, "That is what we will be discovering over the year."

After the students created representations of symbols that came to mind when they thought of hope and had a chance to "think about their thinking", the student raised his hand again to ask if the downturn in the economy is affecting the study of hope or hopes of individuals. We added that one to our list of questions. Later when the class was getting ready to go home, the student informed me that he had another two questions for me to write down. "How did I decide to study stuff? Why did I decide to study hope?" These are stories that I can tell next time. In the meantime, I will repeat what I often tell children and youth. That is, "We should have engaged them in conversations about hope a long time ago!