Hope is a Muscle

Nicholas Kristoff doesn’t look away. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes about people all over the world who experience great loss. He interviews people in the middle of their suffering and shares what he has learned with the rest of us. And despite witnessing some of the worst of what humans can experience, he is not a pessimist.

In a recent podcast episode of “Everything Happens with Kate Bowler,” he was asked if his family had a motto, and if so, what would it be? His response, in part, was this: “I think that (my father) thought that hope had, you know, kept him alive, that better days would, would come and that it’s not something passive, but that hope is a muscle.”

“Hope is a muscle.” That phrase stood out. The suggestion that “hope is a muscle” feels worthy of some reflection.

What if Hope is a Muscle?

And maybe a little internet research. The internet suggested that “hope is a muscle” hit the scene in 1995 as part of the title of a non-fiction book about a girls’ basketball team:

In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle: A True Story of Hoop Dreams and One Very Special Team by Madeleine Blais. The internet also referenced a quote by Krista Tippett, host of the “On Being” radio show, who said that hope was not only a muscle but also “a practice” and “a choice.”

What if Nicolas Kristoff, Krista Tippet, Madeleine Blais, and a high school girls basketball team are right? What if “hope is a muscle?”

Could Hope be a Bird?

Author Madeleine Blais was inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem about hope. Yet Dickinson’s hope was not a muscle, but a bird:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all –

In Dickinson’s imagery, hope is both delicate and enduring. Dickinson’s hope exists deep within us, and it is also its own thing separate from us. We hear its song and feel its comfort and inspiration, but we do not support its singing. We are passive recipients of its benefits.

Exercising the Hope Muscle

The suggestion that “hope is a muscle” reveals an important and different aspect of hope. Hope is an innate part of us, as fundamental to our humanity as our muscles are to our bodies. How strong hope becomes, however, has much to do with how much we choose to use and exercise that muscle.

It’s understandable that after a huge loss, we can feel the heaviness of those close emotional cousins, helplessness and hopelessness. While both feelings are very real, each one is also deceptive.

Immediately after a loss, we can feel totally helpless. This is no doubt true when we think of the thing we want to change the most, which is the past. In the face of our deep desire to change the reality of our past and what has been lost, we are fully helpless.

Yet, we are not helpless in all things. The choices we make in the present impact both our present and the future. Our choices can even impact how we think of our past. While it remains true that in terms of changing the past, we stand helpless, we are not helpless in how we tell the story of the past. This storytelling and future-focused agency is not all that we want, not even close, but it does mean that we are not completely helpless.

Hope in Hindsight

Hopelessness is similarly deceiving. After loss, we can search and find no signs of hope in us. But if we are still alive, if our heart still beats, our lungs take in air, and we can move at all, hope is present. Our hope as a muscle may feel weak and spent, fully inadequate to the task at hand, but it exists waiting to become stronger.

As the days go by, as our hearts still beat, our lungs continue to breathe in and out, and our bodies rest and rise again, our hope muscle strengthens. What felt impossible at first becomes doable, an insight that sometimes we only see with the wisdom of hindsight.

As our bodies continue to move and work, hope can gradually strengthen as a muscle in our hearts and minds, too. We can find ourselves thinking more about the future, although we may start small like the future of the next minute or later this morning before being able to think of tomorrow, the coming week, or next month. And as we think more of the future, we are exercising our hope muscles, and they gain strength and endurance.

Hope Over Despair

Eventually, it is possible for our hope as a muscle to do what was initially unimaginable: We can look at our lives after great loss and not despair.

I’m reminded of a personal story that seems to illustrate the point. Years ago, as part of a fitness routine, I would do pushups several times a week. Then I had abdominal surgery. The surgery was a success, and I needed to rest those abdominal muscles to allow for healing. Those muscles did still help me to stand, sit, walk, and rollover in bed, but they did much less than before.

Eventually, there came a day to try again to do pushups. I was anxious as there was an interior tightness around the place where the incision was healing. I didn’t know if it would allow me to do even a few pushups. But I decided that even if it was just a few, I needed to try. I assumed the pushup position and the tightness was there more keenly, but I went ahead.

Building Up Hope

After just a few pushups, something inside released. It was like the internal healing needed to be stretched, and when it was, I was free to begin building up my strength again. It was disappointing how low my strength and endurance had dropped, but gradually, with choice and practice, my strength and endurance increased and what was impossible became normal. In my present fitness routine, I regularly do more pushups than I did before my surgery which reminds me that post-traumatic growth is possible, too.

Thankfully, hope is a thing with feathers which sings in our souls in spite of the situation, and it is also a muscle which strengthens the more it is used. May we each give hope an extra flex today and again tomorrow and then see where it might take us as we build from there.

Greg Adams is Program Coordinator at Center for Good Mourning: www.archildrens.org

Read more from Greg Adams on Open to Hope: https://www.opentohope.com/after-a-major-loss-so-now-what/

 

Greg Adams

Greg Adams is a social worker at Arkansas Children's Hospital (ACH) where he coordinates the Center for Good Mourning, a grief support and outreach program, and works with bereavement support for staff who are exposed to suffering and loss. His past experience at ACH includes ten years in pediatric oncology and 9 years in pediatric palliative care. He has written for and edited The Mourning News, an electronic grief/loss newsletter, since its beginning in 2004. Greg is also an adjunct professor in the University of Arkansas-Little Rock Graduate School of Social Work where he teaches a grief/loss elective and students are told that while the class is elective, grief and loss are not. In 1985, Greg graduated from Baylor University majoring in social work and religion, and he earned a Masters in Social Work from the University of Missouri in 1986. One answer to the question of how he got into the work of grief and death education is that his father was an educator and his mother grew up in the residence part of a funeral home where her father was a funeral director. After growing up in a couple small towns in Missouri south of St. Louis, Greg has lived in Little Rock since 1987. He married a Little Rock native in 1986 and his wife is an early childhood special educator and consultant. Together they have two adult children. Along with his experience in the hospital with death and dying and with working with grieving people of all ages, personal experiences with death and loss have been very impacting and influential. In 1988, Greg’s father-in-law died of an unexpected suicide. In 1996, Greg and his wife lost a child in mid-pregnancy to anencephaly (no brain developed). Greg’s mother died on hospice with cancer in 2008 and his father died after the family decided to stop the ventilator after a devastating episode of sepsis and pneumonia in 2015. Greg has a variety of interests and activities—including slow running, reading, sports, public education, religion, politics, and diversity issues—and is active in his church and community. He is honored to have the opportunity to be a contributor for Open to Hope.

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