Tag: hope

It’s been a rough year for many of us. Our country, as well as many others across the globe, has been ravaged by fierce political and social divides, unprecedented mass violence, and natural disasters from fires to hurricanes with the unfortunate promise of more to come.

As the Holidays roll around, it may be challenging—if not impossible—to feel the Holiday Spirit of peace, good will toward all, and the joy of a year well lived.

As a parent, you never want to see your child in emotional pain. When you do, you often have a natural instinct to want to do everything in your power to take away their pain. Sometimes, you cannot automatically "fix" your child's situation as quickly as you would like to. Your child has to go through their own healing process to find success on the other side.

There is, however, something very powerful that every parent can do when their child is experiencing emotional pain and that is hope and empathetic understanding.

The world has been feeling a bit topsy-turvy these days, right? There has been a loose framework supporting our ideas around what life is about and how it will proceed that seems to be crumbling. It can cause you to wonder what you can count on looking ahead and that can lead to fear-based feelings and a contraction of our energy.

The other day, I was given a glimpse, a wave of knowing you might say, of what I believe is going on behind the scenes that I want to share with you now because I believe it will give you hope.

My best friend and I had a vigorous discussion recently about the relative merits of process versus results. She was extolling the virtues of process and processing, and I was nattering on about "results, results, results." Yet the obvious conclusion at the end of our conversation, was that both are necessary and valuable. Without process/processing, there is no valid result. Without a result in mind, process/processing is so much mental-meandering.

The word inspiration often conjures up nebulous, vague, airy images. It can be difficult to pin down what is missing when we aren’t feeling inspired, but we often feel 'heavy' or listless. Is there a more practical way to think about and generate inspiration rather than waiting for it to strike?

Our word inspiration comes from Latin and means to "breathe in." Taking a deep breath can help us begin to generate inspiration, but there is more. Out of the 200 or so emotions humans have, there are some that help us become and stay inspired.

Of all the positive emotions, hope is unique. It is the only one that requires negativity or uncertainty to get underway. None of the others, such as joy, gratitude, interest, awe, love, or serenity, need this kind of jump-start. They can be experienced without another emotion to set them in motion. Hope is also different than faith. Hope happens when we have an expectation we can control our future. Faith is when we believe something else holds sway over it. Hope takes place when we can expect to influence the outcome—and we lose it when we don’t think we can.

The name Hope appears in every chapter of the 30-plus year wine industry history of Paso Robles. Chuck Hope planted one of the first vineyards just east of the Salinas River in 1978, and was instrumental in establishing the region’s solid reputation for high quality grape growing. He helped other vineyards get their start and was a founding member of what is now the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance.