Looking for Hope

And maybe how to find it?

Jul 07, 2025

low-angle photo of white daisy — Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Lately, I’ve been looking a lot for hope.

Reporters deal with facts, right? They deal with truth that creates trust between them and the readers and the community at large.

So, you have to put things out there knowing . . . just knowing . . . that by the simple act of reporting accurately and quickly you’re going to annoy some people, worry some people, incite disparagement in some people.

But you still have to do it, right?

Not for influence. Not for advertising dollars, but simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Sometimes that makes it hard to be hopeful.

man sitting on bench reading newspaper — Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

According to an article in Psychology Today, “research shows the more hope you have:

The less likely you are to experience depression and anxiety.
The more likely you are to be satisfied with life.
The more likely you are to report improved overall well-being.
The more productive you’ll be. Hopeful employees are 14% more productive than their counterparts. Lopez, S. J. (2013). Making hope happen: create the future you want for yourself and others. New York, Free Press.
The more likely you are to do well in school. Hope is a better predictor of academic achievement than IQu, personality, and even prior academic achievement.”

So we want that hope.

Here’s the thing. I don’t have it all figured out. I may never have it all figured out. And I lose hope all the time. And I mess up all the time. I am the queen of typos when it comes to my own work and I’ve pretty much lost all hope of being anything BUT the queen of typos.

So, I had a little mini-quest for inspiration to give me some hope, and I found a couple of old quotes from 2024 commencement speeches and they helped me out though I’m long past college graduate stage in my life.

Here’s one from Jennifer Coolidge at Washington University in St. Louis.

“You don’t have to leave here today and … have it all figured out. I didn’t, and … maybe the delays sort of helped me in some way. Maybe I’m actually truer to myself because I had so many things that were disappointing. And enduring them somehow … is sort of like you’re invisibly training for something really cool.”

Pretty cool, right?

We are enduring together, this country, this world. And maybe we’re all invisibly training for something cool?

I like to think that, but even if not, this quote from Rainn Wilson at the Weber State University is pretty interesting, too.

“When we pass away … we don’t take with us our Teslas or our Xboxes,” Wilson said. “At the very end of our lives, if, in fact, we are all spiritual beings having a human experience, we take with us only one thing: that bouquet of internal character qualities we’ve nurtured, gathered, and exercised over the course of our lives.”

So, I want to nurture truth. I want to nurture hope. I want to nurture building a community and the people and organizations in it up instead of down. I never want to be the person who calls something kind “b.s.” or “schmaltz” or says that someone else, someone they don’t know is an idiot for posting photos of a parade.

I want to gather and exercise and nurture goodness. How about you?

That’s what I think hope is about and living happy is about, too.

It’s about the journey. It’s about the choices we each make to care for others, not just our selves.

David Grann spoke at Boston University. Grann was a guy who searched for a giant squid. He did not find that squid. He did find an adventure that made him a journalist.

“Often,” Grann said, “the most rewarding moments of our quest are the ones born of seeming setbacks, the ones that opened our eyes to new possibilities and led to triumphant ends we could not fathom.”

Here’s to that triumphant end, okay?

And here are some quick links about finding hope.

Via Psychology Today

Via The Greater Good

Via The American Psychological Association