Hope

Hope as something you practise rather than something you feel, and what it looks like when it is difficult.

• Planting trees you will not sit under

  Wishes aimed past the end of your own life: for children, for a future self, for a world you will not be around to see.

• Nobody hopes for a mountain

  The hopes people actually hold are unremarkable ones, and that is not a failure of imagination. It is what hope looks like when it is being used.

• Hope cannot be disappointed. Expectation can.

  Expectation is a claim about the future that the future can break. Hope is not a claim at all, and treating the two as the same thing causes a specific and avoidable kind of pain.

• Hope is something you do

  Hope is usually described as a feeling that arrives or fails to. It behaves much more like a direction you keep choosing, and that difference matters when the feeling is gone.