what gives you hope?

From Hunting for Hope: A Father's Journeys, by Scott Russell Sanders.

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An old proverb warns that anyone who feeds on hope will die fasting. And indeed we will starve if our bread is baked from air. If we are to be nourished by hope, it must be grounded in real sources, common sources, ones available not only to heroes and saints, but to everyone, everywhere. To base our lives on a belief in the impossible, as Mencken acidly observed, is to live in delusion. But it would be just as foolish to hold too narrow a view of what is possible.

After Vaclav Havel was released from the last in a series of prison terms for his protests against the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, and well before the democratic revolution that would overthrow that regime and raise him to the presidency, he told an interviewer, "I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from 'elsewhere.' " For years, Havel and his fellow dissidents had been circulating petitions, drafting manifestos, staging protest plays, smuggling news to the outside world, with very little to show for it aside from their prison records. What kept them struggling? Not a belief that their cause would prevail, but a belief that their cause was right. "Hope is definitely note the same thing as optimism," Havel explained. "Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons." Havel's actions make clear that he was not saying that our hope should be invested elsewhere, in heaven or a utopian future, but that it comes from elsewhere, to encourage and strengthen us for good works here.

Wherever that certainty comes from, wherever we anchor our hope -- in wildness, beauty, community, or God; in human skill and knowledge and compassion -- I believe that we are called to use the strength of it in our own place and time. Those who seek a homeland only in paradise are unlikely to care for their actual homelands in this world. We are not strangers and exiles on earth; we belong here, every neuron and bone. By all means let us yearn and work for a "better country," but let it be this country. Let us begin healing the wounds we see all around us, in land and people and in the great fellowship of creatures. What I hear from my children and my students is a cry for thisworldly hope. I can't offer them a surefire program for easing the world's griefs, but I can show them an orientation of the heart. I can't give them hope as if it were a package neatly wrapped, but I can show them where I have searched for it, and where, in moments of grace, I have found it.