Make sure hope part of holidays

It’s the onset of our annual holiday season, when gratefulness, gift-giving and anticipation of a new year come over us. It’s coming during troubled times.

Nationally and internationally, the problems seem overwhelming. One war, between Ukraine and Russia, keeps dragging along with no clear victory in sight, while horrors are unfolding in a brand-new Israel-Hamas war.

All this while the Earth warms, the climate changes and the weather turns extreme.

On our homefront, there’s a pitched battle coming between authoritarianism and democratic rule — something we can dread for the coming year — while other issues like abortion, gun violence and immigration pull us apart at the seams. Even states like New Mexico and Texas are squaring off at their borders over such issues.

Meanwhile, we’re in a mental health crisis, and the loneliness that many feel during the holidays isn’t going to help. It’s hard to have hope under such circumstances, and yet that’s exactly what we need to, mentally and emotionally, survive.

Time magazine recently published a piece by Angela Haupt on “5 ways to cultivate hope when you don’t have any.”

“Hope is a way of thinking,” Haupt quotes Chan Hellman of the Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma saying. “We know it can be taught; we know it can be nurtured. It’s not something you either have or don’t have.”

Hope has great benefits. It gives us a healthier disposition. It fights off depression and anxiety, and strengthens our social connections. Studies suggest it even helps us live longer.

Haupt’s article goes on to outline five practical things we can do to make us more hopeful:

• Give yourself permission to be hopeful. “Don’t get your hopes up” can actually be bad advice; looking positively toward the future can actually lift you up.

• Set at least one meaningful goal and work, really work, to accomplish it. Make your goal something we want to do, not just what you have to do.

• Brainstorm solutions so you don’t set your sights on a goal without knowing how to achieve it.

• Call your support team — friends and family — to keep yourself motivated in your efforts to achieve your goal.

• And tap into your imagination. When you achieve your goal, what will you do then? Looking into your future in such a positive light is “the very essence of hope,” Hellman says.

So off we go, into another season filled with love, life and loneliness. Let’s make sure hope is part of it all.

— Tom McDonald

Santa Rosa Communicator