Hope

"Hope is patience with the lamp lit." - Tertullian

Hope is an essential part of the New Year; so is looking back at the past year to review what we got right and what we would do differently if we had the chance. I like doing this in the extreme silence that fills my house once the family leaves and the fun of the holidays has ended. There is no quiet quite as quiet as the quiet that falls on a house after it has been full of happy noise; I like to savor that.  

My New Years ritual centers around a new date book. I marvel at the clean empty pages, wondering what will fill them - good times or bad? I walk through the year ahead, transposing birthdays, anniversaries and dates to remember; and, I look back on the entries that fill last year's pages. So cluttered and chaotic, some of those "weeks at a glance" seem; no wonder, at times, I felt like I couldn't catch my breath.

Details like "dog flea meds" are juxtaposed against major events like "Emmi's surgery" or "anniversary of my mom's death." Work meetings, social gatherings and volunteer commitments chronicle the predictable, while trips and vacations trigger wonderful memories. These things - the trivial, the insignificant and the hugely important - made up last year; again, I wonder what the new year will bring.

This year, I took a long walk with my favorite dog on New Years Day. We went to Fort Yargo and walked around the lake. The sky was bright; the air was crisp and clear. There was a slight breeze and the reflection of the scenery in the lake was lovely, just lovely, in every way. My sense of optimism soared and I marveled at the high hopes that came to me so easily.

"Either this is going to be a really great year or disaster is right around the corner," I thought to myself, trying not to kill the happy buzz with my usual doom and gloom. "It's easy to feel hopeful when things are going well, but will these feelings last when bad things happen?"   

Near the end of the trail I saw a woman, dressed all in blue, walking very, very slowly come out of the forest and make her way towards her car. She looked to be about my age, but was bent, like a person who is sick or weak or profoundly tired. She had on a hat and under it there was no hair. My thought was that she was a cancer patient and the battle was getting the best of her. Yet there she was, at Fort Yargo, taking a walk on New Years Day.

There was a dog in her car and, judging from the white on his face, he was not young. I don't know why he was in the car, except maybe she was too weak to walk him. She seemed barely able to remain upright, herself. As the woman approached her car, the dog's ears perked up and his face lit up and he started rocking back and forth, the way a really excited dog does. When she caught sight of him, waiting so excitedly for her in the car, her sad, ashen-colored, tired but determined looking face lit up and for a moment, she didn't seem sick.  

She greeted him and he greeted her and then they drove off, leaving me feeling humbled by the display of substantive hope and profound optimism I had just seen. If a woman ravaged by cancer can take a walk on a beautiful day and an elderly dog can wait for her, happily, in the car at the park, who was I to question the validity of the hope I was feeling in my healthy, un-hardship challenged life? With that flash of perspective, the dangling fears I had left for what the new year might bring disappeared.

None of us knows what lies ahead or what kind of notations our date books will be filled with. My hope is that whatever the twists and turns, I am able to face, experience and enjoy them with the same courage, tenacity, patience, hope and joy that I witnessed, watching that woman come out of the woods and greet her dog.