Hope vs. Belief: Navigating Life's Dreams and Realities | Day 17 of my 2023 Journal

Believing in hope.

There is this poem in my language about optimists and pessimists, about what we hope and what we believe.

I always pondered on it. What does it really mean? In the poem, the pessimists are the foolish ones, believing in the opposite of their hopes, and the optimists are the ones we have to build our lives on, as they dare to hope for what they believe in.

But what does it mean?

It is about daring to hope.

Optimism is not being naive or ignorant; it is being courageous. It is daring to hope and daring to choose to hope for something we actually believe in. Something important. Something obtainable.

The life I live today is, to the fullest, the life I dreamt about five years ago, and I know I have to work on my dreams to create a future.
I know my belief system frames the dreams I dare to dream. As always, the core is to know our values, to lead from the heart, and to have ideals, principles, philosophy, and faith to direct our understanding.

Yet - here is what really puzzles me. Why did the author frame it like this: Daring to hope for something we believe in?

Why not: Daring to believe in what they hope for?

That would have made much more sense, would have been logical, and would have been easy. But this one is hard: What does it mean?

Do we have to tone down our hopes to something we find realistic (boring), or do we have to hope for the ideal? Or do we have to stretch our understanding to the field between the two? Look at the edges of our belief system to transcend our understanding in the direction of the ideal. Push the ideal into the reality we experience, with its limitations and imperfections.

I am not sure. I might never understand.

I like to think about it.

The relation between our belief system and our hopes, the life we create for ourselves and the reality we consider to be real, what we dare to think, and how we choose to understand it all. How we carry ourselves, and how we allow something bigger to carry us.

What do you think?

Love and light

Cecilie Conrad