“Hope”, if I ask you the meaning of the word, you’ll definitely be able to give me an answer. But if I ask how many of you are positive that your life is going in the right direction and you’re hopeful about the future, I guess half of the same people who gave the answer won’t have too much to say now. Or that may be specific to people around me, but given that I work in the IT industry, my test sample still counts for over 5% of the country’s population and almost 99.987% engineers.
So why that difference? Why is it that we can always tell others that it will all be okay but fail to convince ourselves the same? I understand that it can be a little difficult, knowing all the facts and chances and still thinking that things will be fine, people who find it too difficult call it pragmatism. But I believe that with a little confidence, even the biggest of problems can be faced and to have that confidence in yourself, you need the positivity, the hope.
Don’t worry, I’m not preaching and I’ve definitely not started my own business of spreading happiness. But what I’m saying here is that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing and whatever your age is, just stop for a moment and think about how positive you are about your life and how helpful will it be if you were just a little bit more hopeful about how things will turn out for you. Confused? Let me share a story, I once told the good old people on Quora.
“About two and a half years back, my friend had bought a new bike. As a ritual that almost everyone does, we went to a temple. On our way back from there, I saw a beggar sitting beside the stairway to the temple. He was blind. He wasn’t really begging for money but mainly just sitting and smiling. Hundreds of people were walking by that staircase and every third or fourth person passing by dropped maybe a coin and sometimes a bigger amount of money for him and as I noticed, he didn’t say anything. He was continuously smiling though.
When I passed by him, a thought crossed my mind and I gave him the pack of sweets I had with me. He didn’t say anything but his usual smile covered his face. I had never seen a smile like that before on a grown-up’s face. It conveyed satisfaction and approval of life in the best way possible. Imagine something like this just on a grown-up’s face.
Just too happy with life the way it is.
Then I thought for a second and it struck me. This is what life is. Don’t complain for what you don’t or can’t have and learn to accept some things. It doesn’t mean we have to accept everything, it obviously doesn’t mean we’ll stop working towards getting better, but we won’t waste our time in being sad about the current problems we have.
Maybe that man didn’t have any idea of what he taught me. Maybe his perspective of life was entirely different from what I imagined then. Maybe… A lot of things… but the bottom line is, I learned that we need to appreciate life and be positive about the future.
What thousands of articles and books and what not couldn’t teach me, that man did within a minute. Sometimes all you need is that one moment to set things right.”
I guess now what I said above will make more sense. Why I wrote all this and shared here? Well, here’s why. I came across these lines today and I couldn’t resist writing about it.
“As elusive as it may seem, optimism can be found all around – in the laughter of children, in the excitement on your pet’s face when you get back after a long day, and in the smile of your loved ones when you go back home after months of being away. Housing envisions a world filled with positivity.” Not to mention that these lines came from this beautiful website called https://housing.com/lookup.
And that, my friends was the reason I shared this moment that told me the meaning of hope and taught me a lesson I’ll probably never forget. It looks pretty simple to most at first, but when you take a deep look into your own life and the things you want to do, you’ll realize that many such moments are waiting for you too. Or maybe you don’t need a moment, maybe this, right now, is your moment. Think about it, and tell me if it helped. 🙂
