Letting Go of Hope

I have begun to practice letting go of hope. And this is a good thing. Well, maybe "good" is not the right word. It is a forward step though. I have the habit, I now realize, of hanging on to hope long past the space and time that it is relevant or useful. And I do it in such a way that is a little pretentious- as in "look at me! Look at how optimistic and glass is half full I am."  I think I use hopefulness as a way to solidify an identity that is pleasing and attractive to both myself and others.

I'll tell you, this is not easy to admit. Letting go of the habit of being hopeful feels like I am losing a little bit of me because I have infused it so seamlessly into my personality.

So why do it you ask?  Good question. And my answer is, I have no other choice.

I think releasing my tight grip on hope is difficult in part because it is so counterintuitive. My mind says: hope is a good thing and I should cling to all good things. Kind of like the aversive response most of us have to pain: pain is bad so push it away. It is the same spectrum. At one end is internal wanting and desire with the outward behavior of clinging. At the opposite end of the same spectrum is the internal experience of aversion and disgust which comes out in the world as pushing away. Two opposite ends of the exact same spectrum like east coast, west coast.

But what I'm learning in my Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction class is that sometimes the way through pain is to lean into it, explore it with curiosity, and every so often even embrace it.

For me, surrendering to that pain is what sits on the opposite side of my coin of hopefulness-clinging to hopefulness is my way of avoiding the depth of pain in the form of grief that waits for me on the other side.  And that does not work. In fact, it is a sure fire way to become stuck.

When I was 23 years old my aunt was dying of lung cancer that had swept through her body in 7 months. At the end of her life she was in a coma on intubation in ICU. The doctors told us she was not pain due to the morphine they were giving her, and it was just a matter if time.  But even with all of that information, some of the family clung on to hope.

At first I admired the hopefulness because I judged it as a stamp of high character- or in other words, I judged it good.  But that was until I had a conversation with my cousin, who's mother it was who was dying. My cousin said she was frustrated with the continued hopeful wishes and prayers from family in these last stages of her mother's death.  She said she needed the family to let go of hope so that her grieving process could proceed forward. For my cousin, her anticipatory grief, which you experience in an illness that more slowly claims the life of your loved one, became stagnated by the hopefulness expressed around her dying mother. For her, it was time to let go of hope so she could get on with the process of saying a final goodbye to her mother, and in that goodbye, embracing not hope, but instead surrendering to acceptance.

Now, I think of that experience 14 years ago as I again find myself clinging to hope as a means to avoid grief. I see how this avoidance has become a habit and therefore an obstacle to radical acceptance of a very painful reality in my own life.  And I do feel stuck.

This is frustrating to me because I feel like I am standing on a mountainside with a gorge below, and I can see the space so clearly across the way that leads to the other side of the mountain, opposite to where I am now standing. And on the other side is freedom, liberation from myself. But there is no bridge crossing over the gorge. Or, at least I don't think there is.

Until I remember that the bridge is invisible. Because the bridge is comprised of a tapestry of truths that cannot be seen with the naked eye like faith, trust and love. And so I must just close my eyes and lift my right foot to step off the mountainside knowing that the invisible bridge will hold me until I reach the other side. Until I reach freedom.

Unitarian Universalist Chaplain and writer Kate Braestrup says in her book "Beginner's Grace:" "Faith is, rather, knowing that there is a goodness and rightness in the world that is of God: a righteous, grand, and holy love that I will never wholly grasp but in which I am invited to participate through the giving and receiving of human love."

Those words, "that I will never wholly grasp" are key for me in this process of letting go of hope. Because it is counterintuitive for me. Because in a large way it does still feel just wrong. But Ms. Braestrup is saying, that's actually okay. That is faith.

So I will practice. I will observe my desire for the alternate reality that "should" be or could be if only...and try to ground myself in acceptance of this reality.  And in so doing I will experience the grief and pain that was sitting patiently on the other side of the coin of hope. Waiting for its own turn to be embraced just as willingly as I embraced its cousin, hope, a hundred times over.

What in your life is it time to let go of? What hope are you clinging to as a means of avoiding acceptance of reality as it is in your life?