I’ve been thinking about hope lately, and where hope is helpful and helps you sustain effort or perseverance and where it might actually get in the way. Where having hope is more of a form of denial or numbing—where it might keep you from action rather than support you into action. I’m thinking about a conversation with my therapist many years ago where she talked about a more ‘mature hope’—a hope that could hold disappointment—a hope that took in the world the way it was, took in the losses that were there and kept putting one foot in front of the other anyway.

I have always been hopeful and optimistic, but as I was driving home today from a rejuvenating weekend in nature—I reflected on where I got to practice not just hope, but what I might call ‘hope-in-action.’ Where you don’t just imagine a brighter future, you simultaneously do something.

It was the summer of 1980. I was 15 and a Girl Scout Camper. There were maybe 30 of us on one side of the lake. We lived in two different tent units and there was a stone building where we ate our meals and hung out around a central fireplace. There was a bathroom in this building that had imperative, “Go Be!” written in 2 foot letter cut outs from wallpaper on the mirror so you couldn’t miss it. The ‘Go’ was in one print—kind of faded. And the ‘Be’ was in another print -bright and floral. The ‘Go’ had once been part of a different sentence, “Good Morning” and now had been repurposed into the directive for action.

The first night of camp the Camp Director Joan told us about the command written in the bathroom: that we were to imagine the summer we wanted to create and go do it, go be it. To become the best versions of ourselves. She directed us in a activity to brainstorm all the things we would love to do in our time there and be as bold as we could be. In our brainstorming a group of us wanted to go backpacking and canoeing on the same trip. We didn’t want to choose. She said, “if that’s what you want, then come to me with a plan.” And so we spent the next two days planning. We kept thinking of reasons why it might be too big of an ask. It meant a long time away from camp and a bunch of resources to pick us up and drop off equipment. She said, ‘keep planning.’ So we worked with counselors to pick a hiking trail that wasn’t too far away in the Western Catskills and we risked asking for the canoe trip we really wanted which included Skinner’s Falls. In the end, we had a plan, we had an equipment and food list, and we had a plan to get into canoeing and hiking shape. The Combination Trip had been born.

Of the actual 7 day trip I remember flashes: hiking under the canopy of trees—the Western Catskills being high on greenery and low on scenic views. I remember the excitement of Skinner’s Falls and life-jacketing down the Delaware where the Mongaup river flows in—trying to keep my feet up and my head above water. I remember putting up tents and making meals high above the river. But the details of the trip aren’t what stays with me.

What stays with me is the experience of starting with hope and living that hope into action. And living hope into action requires more than just a big idea or a feeling of optimism.  Often hope is so big and feels so out of reach that what hope actually needs is ballast. That summer of ’80, ballast came in the form of Joan’s supportive discipline to take our idea and put in the work of planning it. The supportive discipline not to do it for us, or even to tell us what would or wouldn’t work, but the request to keep planning and working with each other. The requirement to stay with the tedious parts of planning and preparing. To hold onto what we visioned and hoped for, but to slow down and create the structure that would hold it.

So maybe a mature hope is one where we can ‘go be.’ We can imagine a better future, and we can hold ourselves with patience as we work toward it. We can hold both the shiny picture we have in our heads and the mundane or dull work that’s required to bring that hope into action. We can hold all the parts of ourselves in one place long enough for our hopes and our abilities to link arms into action. Go be: be big, be tired, be helpful, be stubborn, be friendly, be scared, be experienced, be new, be bold, be angry, be brave. All of it. Go be.

 © 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD